A Hidden Wisdom

A Hidden Wisdom
Medieval Contemplatives on Self-Knowledge,
Reason, Love, Persons, and Immortality

CHRI S T I NA VAN DYKE

 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s
objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a
registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Christina Van Dyke 2022
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2022
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University
Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate
reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above
should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any
acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022942370
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198861683.001.0001
ebook ISBN 978–0–19–260616–7
Printed and bound in the UK by
Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford
disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this
work.
 For Bob Pasnau,
my philosophical older brother, without whose prodding
(“Surely you can write something about medieval mysticism!”)
this book would never have begun, and

for David,
my favorite and only child, without whose prodding
(“Seriously Mom, how have you not sent that off yet?”)
this book might never have been finished.
 Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface
List of Figures
1. Mysticism, Methodology, and Epistemic Justice
1.1 Implicit Assumptions and the Case of ‘Mystical Experience’
1.1.1 A standard contemporary definition of ‘mystical experience’
1.1.2 Debates about mysticism in the twentieth century
1.2 Apophatic Self-Abnegation
1.3 Correcting via Complementing: Embracing Embodied Experiences
1.4 Philosophical Morals and Historical Narratives
1.5 Looking Ahead
Interlude One: Who Is This Book About?
2. Self-Knowledge
2.1 Putting the Self into Perspective
2.2 Recommendations for Developing Self-Knowledge
2.2.1 Look outside yourself to know yourself: the mirror of self-
knowledge
2.2.2 Root down in humility to rise up in dignity: the tree of self
2.2.3 Use reason and imagination to overcome selfish pride
2.3 Self-Knowledge, Mystic Union, and Our Final End
2.3.1 Our final end as self-annihilation
2.3.2 Our final end as self-fulfillment
2.4 Conclusion
Interlude Two: What Is a Beguine?
3. Reason and Its Limits
3.1 The Nature of Reason
3.2 Taking Leave of Reason
3.3 Reason as Guide
3.4 Reason as Enhanced by Mystical Union
3.5 Scientia vs. Sapientia
Interlude Three: When Did Reading Become a Sign of Religious Devotion
for Women?
4. Love and the Will
4.1 The Will in Context
4.1.1 Sensation and sense appetite
4.1.2 Imagination
4.2 Meditation and the Will
4.3 Contemplation and Love
4.4 Clear Eyes, Full Hearts: Women’s Bodies and the Reception of
Truth
Interlude Four: Where Does the Erotic Imagery of Medieval Mystics Come
from?
5. Persons
5.1 Putting ‘Person’ in Perspective
5.1.1 Grammatical and logical context
5.1.2 Legal and political context
5.1.3 Theological context
5.2 Individuality, Dignity, and Rationality in Contemplative Texts
5.2.1 Individuality and agency
5.2.2 Dignity
5.2.3 Rationality
5.3 Personal Perspectives, Personification, and Introspection
5.4 Looking Forward: Locke and Personalism
Interlude Five: Why Do Medieval Women Talk Like They Hate
Themselves?
6. Immortality and the Afterlife
6.1 The Metaphysics of Immortality
6.2 Transcending Matter, Becoming God
6.3 Embodied Immortal Experience
6.4 Intellective Union and the Scholastic Tradition
6.4.1 Robert Grosseteste
6.4.2 Thomas Aquinas
6.5 Conclusion
Afterword

Bibliography
Index
 Acknowledgments

This book has been a long time in the researching and writing, and I’ve
worked up quite a debt of gratitude in the process. If I should have included
you and have somehow forgotten, I’m terribly sorry. I encourage you to tell
all your friends to read this book so that they can see what you were a part
of, and I promise that I’ll start my acknowledgments list earlier in the
process of my next book. First credit goes, as promised, to the person who
helped me come up with a title that evokes exactly what I was hoping for,
while also providing the perfect ‘hook’ for the grocery list of topics that
make up the subtitle: Robin Dembroff, thank you! When the pandemic is over
and/or we’re both in the same place at the same time again, dinner’s on me.
I also need to thank Bob Pasnau—not just for originally assigning me the
chapter on mysticism in The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy but
for cheering me on ever since then as I’ve delved further and further into the
medieval contemplative tradition, and especially for providing me with a full
set of very helpful comments on the entire manuscript. Ursula Renz also
played a crucial role in this book’s history, although I’m sure she doesn’t
know it; I had already gone back to writing about Thomas Aquinas when she
invited me to write a chapter on self-knowledge in medieval mystics for an
Oxford Philosophical Concepts volume she was editing, and it was that essay
that made me realize that I needed to keep going with the contemplatives—I
remain deeply grateful for that invitation and her encouragement of what I
wrote. It is Christia Mercer, however, who can take direct credit for my
actually writing this book. Not only did she tell me that I had a book in the
making already in February 2016, but she then kept inviting me to give talks
on relevant topics at workshops at her Center for New Narratives in the
History of Philosophy at Columbia University. Those workshops introduced
me to both people and ideas that have expanded and deepened my
understanding of medieval mysticism and contemplativism in fantabulous
ways—I’m sure I haven’t done them full justice here, but special thanks in
particular go to Katie Bugyis, Holly Flora, and Lauren Mancia for being
kick-ass theologians, art historians, and historians willing to hang out with
this analytically trained philosopher.
Speaking of people who have worked to create vibrant communities of
scholars with cross-disciplinary interests, many thanks also to Mike Rea and
the crew of his Logos conferences. The Logos conferences may be a thing of
the past, but their impact remains, and I appreciate being made to feel part of
a group (viz., philosophers of religion and analytic theologians) I’d long felt
on the outside of. Thanks also to Scott MacDonald for continuing to hold the
Cornell Medieval Colloquia each year, even now that they’re actually
happening in Brooklyn (and, in 2020–2022, online). The chance to connect
and reconnect there with stellar scholars and friends like Susan Brower-
Toland, Peter King, Scott Williams, and Thomas Williams has made both my
work and my life better in myriad ways I find it hard to quantify. I am also
endlessly grateful to Thomas Williams for reading this entire manuscript and
providing me with not only a host of useful comments but several much-
needed laughs (“These people need to be beaten with a Jesus-stick”) and any
number of pep talks. I look forward to finding out with you exactly what
level of snark is allowed in heaven.
General thanks go to Elizabeth Barnes and Ross Cameron for their
relentless support and encouragement; to Sara Bernstein for such good
advice about so many things and always having my back; to Molly Brown—
Star to my Barb and mother of my godpuppy Elodie (whose adorableness
kept me going during the darkest part of the pandemic); to Amber Griffioen
and Lacey Hudspeth for encouragement, support, and a place to vent about
the mysticism haters; to Amy Seymour, Julia Staffel, and Natalie Hart for
being my writing partners at coffee shops in NYC, Boulder, and Grand
Rapids; and to Laurie Paul for making me feel like it was obvious that I was
going to write an amazing book and that the only real question was how to
make sure the right people read it. A most particular thank you to Keshav
Singh for making me the cootie-catcher that decided which versions of the
names of medieval figures I was going to use in this book when I was going
bananas trying to decide between things like Johannes and John, of Oingt or
d’Oingt. The result may be a bit idiosyncratic, but it is at least consistent
throughout. Many thanks as well to Peter Momtchiloff, who has been
wonderfully encouraging of this project and who sent me a few crucial email
nudges at just the right moment in the fall of 2021.
 It’s hard to know exactly what sort of gratitude I owe to Calvin College
(now University). On the one hand, both the college and my department
provided me with deeply appreciated support and encouragement when I was
a full-time single parent and an assistant (and then tenured and then full)
professor; on the other hand, after several truly stressful years, in 2020
continued budgetary shortfalls led the university to cut a number of tenured
positions, including mine, and I’d be lying if I said that I missed being there. I
do miss what Calvin used to be, however, and I have a deep appreciation not
only for the mission it now seems to have lost but for the people I’ve been
fortunate enough to have shared a department with there, particularly Lindsay
Brainard, Terence Cuneo, Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, Ruth Groenhout (the
next-door office mate than which none greater could be conceived), Matt
Halteman (with only one ‘n’!), Lee Hardy, Al Plantinga (who spent several
‘victory lap’ years there after retiring from Notre Dame), Del Ratzsch, and
Kevin Timpe. The tireless work of first Donna Kruithof and then Laura
McMullen and Corrie Bakker kept me (relatively) organized and (mostly) in
the right places at the right times, and I can’t thank them enough for that. I am
also deeply grateful to the students who have passed through my life over the
twenty years I spent as a faculty member at Calvin, many of whom I now
count as friends. You taught me that the most effective way to communicate
the importance and value of philosophy is to live what you say you believe,
and I am the better for it.
The next two paragraphs are lists of places that supported my research
financially and/or invited me to speak to them about aspects of this project,
and I’m very self-conscious about the fact that they might read like me
bragging about what I’ve been privileged to receive, but I am both obligated
to list them and quite grateful for the opportunities they all represent. That
said, feel free to skip ahead to the part where I start talking about my family.
In chronological order from when I began seriously to work on mystical
experiences and immortality in 2014 to the present, I owe thanks to John
Hawthorne’s New Insights and Directions for Religious Epistemology
project for funding a Hilary Term fellowship at Oxford University, and to
John Martin Fischer’s Immortality Project for a year-long grant to support
my project “(Ever)Lasting Happiness: Immortality and the Afterlife,” which I
amazingly got to combine with a year-long fellowship at Notre Dame’s
Center for the Philosophy of Religion. (Both projects thought they were
funding me to write a book on Aquinas on the afterlife, but instead they
actually supported much of the initial research for this book, and I’m
extremely grateful.) Thanks also to the University of Colorado at Boulder for
inviting me to be their inaugural Distinguished Visitor; to the Aspects of
Religious Experience grant that Laurie Paul and Mike Rea administrated for
their generous support of Robin Dembroff’s and my “Embodied Religion:
Social Structures and Religious Experience”; to the Calvin Alumni Research
Grant for travel funding in 2017, which is when I took a number of the
photographs that appear in this book; to Dean Zimmerman and the Rutgers
Center for the Philosophy of Religion for a year-long fellowship there; and,
finally, to Sidney Sussex College at the University of Cambridge for granting
me the visiting fellowship I was only five weeks away from when the
pandemic shut everything down in March 2020.
Here is a compressed list of places at which I’ve given talks related to
the content of this book, and a far-too-truncated list of the wonderful people
who have spent time talking to me about it there. I am deeply grateful to all
these places and all the people who have worked to get me there—with
special thanks to the administrative staff at various institutions who made my
presence possible! Thanks to audiences at all three regional APAs for their
feedback on various talks; the Epistemology Brownbag series at
Northwestern University; the Cornell Colloquium in Medieval Philosophy;
L’Abri Fellowship International; the University of Konstanz; the University
of Leeds Centre for Philosophy of Religion, as well the Leeds School of
Philosophy, Religion, and History of Science Mangoletsi Lecture Series in
2019—with a special shout-out to Mark Wynn and Robbie Williams for
hosting me so wonderfully; Lingnan University and the University of Hong
Kong; Boğaziçi University in Istanbul; the University of St. Thomas in St.
Paul; the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics; the Brooklyn College
Minorities and Philosophy chapter; the Sheffield Religious Experience
workshop; the Center for New Narratives in the History of Philosophy at
Columbia University; the University of North Carolina at Asheville, St.
Mary’s Philosophy Department Retreat in South Bend; Creighton University;
the 40th Anniversary Conference of the Society of Christian Philosophers;
Shieva Kleinschmidt’s California Conference in Metaphysics; the Society of
Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy; Georgetown University; St Andrew’s
University; the Practical Philosophy Workshop + Women in Philosophy
series at the University of Chicago; the Ayers Lecture in Philosophy and
Theology at Furman University; the Ax:Son Johnson Foundation Seminar for
the Concept of Self-Knowledge in Ancient and Modern Times; the University
of Indiana at Bloomington; the Vrije University at Amsterdam; the American
Academy of Religion; the Goliardic Society at Western Michigan University;
the Medieval Philosophy Colloquium at the University of Toronto; the
Rutgers Center of Philosophy of Religion; the Princeton Project in the
Philosophy of Religion; the University of Trier; and Leiden University.
OK, and now to my family. Tolstoy famously begins Anna Karenina with
the claim that “Happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy
in its own way.” I know that he’s supposed to have meant that there is a list
of common attributes that all families need in order to be happy, but if you’ve
ever met my family you will understand why that sentence has always made
me laugh. We are, in general, very happy and yet I can’t image our hilarious,
bizarre family being like any other family in the world. Mom and Dad—I’m
more glad than I can put into words that you’re still here to see this book
come out, health scares of 2021 notwithstanding. I promise to write any
number of other books if you promise to stick around to bug me about
whether I’ve finished them yet! To my siblings, Jamie, Jon, and CarlaJoy, I
love you excessively; our weekly Zoom family chats during the pandemic
have made me feel closer to you than ever despite the physical distances
between us, and have often left my stomach hurting from laughing so hard.
Thank you also to Jamie and Robin and CarlaJoy and Steve for producing
such excellent niblings—Jon and Aki, Max and Pepper have also been quite
excellent catlings. I’ve already dedicated this book to David, but I want to
make sure everyone knows that David’s amazingness goes far beyond
skeptical side-eye and effective prodding to finish book manuscripts. My
child, your presence in my life has made me happier than I could ever have
expected or even desired. It may not have been easy to share a one-bedroom
apartment with you during strict lockdown in 2020, but there’s no one else I
would have rather gotten irritated with under those circumstances.
No one, that is, except perhaps my beloved, Andrew Arlig. (Which is
good, because I got to share all the lockdowns with you!) Andy, I have been
working on this book the entire time that we have been together, and you have
never been anything but supportive and encouraging about it. It’s been a
challenge in any number of ways combining our lives over the past five and a
half years, but a challenge that is more than worth the effort. Our love is not a
unicorn—magical and illusory; it is a narwhal—rare, weird, and extremely
real. Here’s to years and years of swimming together in the same direction.
 Preface

In college and graduate school, I was taught that women didn’t do philosophy
in the Middle Ages. My teachers were clear that this was a shame, but they
were also clear that their job was to teach me facts, and the facts were that 1)
‘medieval philosophy’ happened primarily in the cathedral schools and
universities of something called the ‘Latin Christian West’ during the
eleventh–fifteenth centuries, and 2) women weren’t allowed to participate in
these discussions.1 This first ‘fact’ has been completely overturned in the
past twenty years; it would be difficult to find a well-respected book about
medieval philosophy published today that didn’t acknowledge the importance
of Greek, Islamic, and Jewish thought from the sixth century on, and new
editions of old textbooks generally take pains to include a variety of these
sources alongside the requisite Anselm, Abelard, Aquinas, Scotus, and
Ockham.2 The truth of the second ‘fact’, however, remains largely accepted,
for women were generally no more welcome in medieval Greek, Islamic, or
Jewish schools than they were in their Latin counterparts. On this view of the
history of philosophy, women were essentially barred from contributing to
philosophy between Hypatia’s death in Alexandria in the fifth century and
Descartes’s correspondence with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia in the
seventeenth century.
I don’t think what I was taught reflects badly on my teachers. At the time
(I started college in 1990 and finished my PhD in 1999), this was not just the
dominant narrative about women and medieval philosophy—it was the only
narrative. It didn’t even bother me particularly. I wrote my dissertation on
Thomas Aquinas’s theory of individuation and identity for human beings, and
I was tenured for my work on Aquinas’s metaphysics and Robert
Grosseteste’s theory of illumination; I found this work both challenging and
rewarding. I channeled my interests in gender and sexuality into side projects
in the philosophy of gender, particularly projects that explored the relation
between gendered eating and religion. Mentally, I compartmentalized my
research as addressing either medieval philosophy (as characterized by
‘fact’ 1) or the philosophy of gender: I hadn’t realized yet that the ‘or’ could
be inclusive. I originally read Caroline Walker Bynum’s monumental Holy
Feast and Holy Fast, for instance, not because it was about the Middle Ages
but because it was about women and the religious significance of food.3 The
bookshelves in my office were packed with Latin texts and secondary
literature on Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham; my
bookshelves at home started to fill up with titles like Holy Anorexia and God
and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages.4
And then, in the academic year 2007–8, I spent my first sabbatical
working with Bob Pasnau on The Cambridge History of Medieval
Philosophy. At some point we had received all fifty-five commissioned
chapters—over one thousand pages of state-of-the-art scholarship on
medieval philosophy in the Greek and Latin Christian, Islamic, and Jewish
traditions—and we realized that not a single chapter discussed texts authored
by medieval women. You could read the entire manuscript and fairly form the
impression that women had taken a collective pass on thinking in the Middle
Ages. This was an unacceptable state of affairs, but how to address it?
Adding a chapter called something like ‘Women and Medieval Philosophy’
struck us both as the worst sort of ad hoc maneuver; adding more mentions of
women in the chapters on, say, poverty or religious orders or war didn’t
address the central issue, which was that it seemed highly implausible that
women had really not contributed anything of value to the ongoing practice of
philosophy in the millennium we were covering in the volume. The question
Bob and I ended up asking each other was “Where were women writing in
the Middle Ages, and what were they writing about?”
As soon as we phrased the question that way, I realized I already knew
the answer—I just hadn’t connected the dots. My teachers had been right that
women didn’t participate in philosophy as it was practiced in scholastic
contexts (that is, in the cathedral schools and universities), but women did
author a vast number of mystical and contemplative texts in the later Middle
Ages, and these women were hardly writing in a philosophical or theological
vacuum: they were integral parts of the intellectual, theological, and cultural
movements of their day.
My joint expertise in thirteenth-century philosophy and gender studies
meant that it fell to me to explore the medieval contemplative tradition for its
philosophical insights. As I rolled up my sleeves and went to work on what
became the chapter in the Cambridge History titled ‘Mysticism’, I
discovered that although mystics and contemplatives in the Middle Ages
might not have thought of themselves as engaging in philosophy per se—and
although what they wrote often tends not to fit neatly into our contemporary
conceptions of philosophy—they have a wealth of insightful things to say
about philosophical topics of perennial interest (such as self-knowledge,
reason and its limits, will and love, persons, and immortality and the
afterlife). Furthermore, the fact that women writing in these traditions didn’t
think of themselves as engaging in philosophy per se shouldn’t prevent us
from considering their works as philosophical, for in this respect they
resemble most of the other figures we today study under the descriptor
‘medieval philosopher’: Augustine’s Confessions was written as a spiritual
memoir, for instance, and Anselm’s Ontological Argument is presented as
part of a prayer for understanding. Even the paradigms of scholastic
philosophy—Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham—were
masters of theology (rather than philosophy) at their respective institutions.5
If we shift our conception of medieval philosophy to include contemplative
texts (as I argue we should in Chapter 1), we find a host of women doing
philosophy in the Middle Ages—including any number of women not
addressed in this book, which focuses on the ‘Latin’6 Christian tradition from
the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries.
When my initial attempt to demonstrate the relevance of the contemplative
tradition to the study of medieval philosophy appeared in the first edition of
The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy (2010), however, my
colleagues in the field didn’t seem particularly interested. As I continued to
argue for its importance and to discuss the contributions of women to this
tradition, I started to wonder if I was trying to make the medieval
philosophical version of ‘fetch’ happen. Then, just as I was giving up hope,
there came a surge of interest in the topic—a surge due in large part, no
doubt, to the successful efforts of scholars like Andrew Janiak, Marcy
Lascano, Christia Mercer, Eileen O’Neill, and Lisa Shapiro to demonstrate
the philosophical significance of women from the early modern period
whose work had previously been downplayed or ignored.7 I started being
asked to give talks on the medieval contemplative tradition and the women
writing within it and to contribute papers on the contemplative tradition to
special journal issues and edited volumes; my fellow historians of medieval
philosophy started to ask me which women-authored texts they should
include on their syllabi and on what topics. And then, in February 2016,
Christia Mercer told me almost off-handedly over breakfast at the Nassau Inn
at Princeton that the work I’d already done on this topic basically amounted
to a book, and that I just should sit down and write it. And so, over the
course of six very long and full years, I did.
Writing this book has been both challenging and exciting. It’s difficult to
highlight the philosophical insights of women-authored texts without coming
across as essentializing their status as women, for instance, but I’ve done my
best. In each chapter I discuss the range of contemplative views on a given
topic in works by both men and women from the Rome-based Christian
tradition of the thirteenth–fifteenth centuries; focusing only on women’s
contributions would produce as skewed a picture of the intellectual
landscape as the traditional focus on scholastics has already produced. At the
same time, I center the contributions of medieval women throughout this
book, for even within the contemplative tradition the philosophical and
theological insights of medieval male figures consistently receive more
attention than their female counterparts. Take, for instance, the introduction to
Pseudo-Dionysius: the Complete Works, in which Jean Leclercq traces
Pseudo-Dionysius’s influence in Western Europe through the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries as follows:
The works of Dionysius provided a powerful contribution in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
to the spirituality that flowered in the Rhine valley and elsewhere among theologians of the
“abstract school,” as historians have termed it. Master Eckhart (d. 1327) proved capable of
adopting fundamentally Dionysian themes, “while changing the meaning substantially.” Several
other writers did more or less the same, each in his own way: Tauler (d. 1361); Ruysbroeck [sic]
(d. 1381), Gerson (d. 1429), Nicholas of Cusa (d. 1464), Denis the Carthusian (d. 1471),
Harphius (d. 1477), and Marsilio Ficino (d. 1499).8

Although this list includes several figures who are hardly household names,
it excludes every single woman writing in the same tradition in this period—
even those such as Marguerite Porete and Hadewijch who had an identifiable
influence on Eckhart and Ruusbroec. This list also overlooks the centrality of
Dionysian themes of unknowing, apophatic silence and divine darkness in
works by any other number of women mystics at this time, such as Angela of
Foligno.
Two more recent examples demonstrate the continued neglect of women
in discussions of medieval philosophy and theology, and they represent
merely the tip of the iceberg of scholarship that fits this bill. First, Stephen
Boulter’s 2019 Why Medieval Philosophy Matters includes as “good
examples of important medieval figures who were not scholastics” the
following list: “John Scotus Eriugena, the Cathari and Albigensians, Bernard
of Tours, Amalic of Bene, Joachim de Floris, Witelo, Theodoric of Freiburg,
Raymond Lully, Roger Marston, Meister Eckhart, Raymond of Sabunde, and
Nicholas of Cusa.”9 Again, not a single woman makes the cut. Second, the
2020 Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology devotes a great deal of
attention to the Western Christian medieval tradition, and yet an entire
chapter on Trinitarian indwelling fails to even mention Julian of Norwich,
while the chapter on depth, ground, and abyss discusses Eckhart, Tauler, and
others (again) without so much as paying lip service to Hadewijch’s and
Marguerite Porete’s influence on those authors, much less their own original
contributions; another chapter discusses theological epistemology and
apophasis in both the ‘intellectualist’ and the ‘affective’ Christian mystical
traditions without naming a single woman, despite the overwhelming number
of medieval women who write about these topics.10
If I have leaned too far in this book towards prioritizing women’s voices
over those of their male contemporaries, it is in the spirit of Aristotle’s
advice in the Nicomachean Ethics 2.7 to steer towards the opposite extreme
in attempting to reach the mean—in this case, the mean of justice.11
Mysticism and contemplativism have traditionally been some of the very few
contexts in which people otherwise denied a voice by Christian institutions
can speak truth to power and be heard. Their focus is not on intensive study
of hierarchical systems of knowledge and texts available primarily to the
elite but on accessible practices such as meditation and contemplative
prayer, and on personal experience of God, which is available to anyone.
Because the Christian tradition acknowledges mystical experiences and
knowledge of God’s hidden truths as granted by God via an act of grace, the
philosophy and theology of mysticism and contemplativism can never be
simply the purview of the powerful: they are available to anyone and
everyone God chooses. (And, as Scripture teaches us, God consistently
chooses the disenfranchised and overlooked.) One of the most important
legacies of the medieval contemplative tradition is the way in which it
creates space for people to connect directly with God and to claim to God’s
own authority in their love-filled striving to unsettle the unjust status quos of
this world. (Consider Catherine of Siena, for instance, the twenty-fourth
child of a Sienese cloth-dyer who becomes an influential political figure as
well as a renowned spiritual teacher—and is not merely canonized by the
Catholic church but eventually made one of its Doctors.) By giving the views
of medieval women more than equal time in this book I hope to highlight (and
contribute to) this legacy, at the same time that I work to contextualize those
views in the intellectual and cultural contexts necessary for understanding
them.
A few quick notes about the book as a whole before I start actually doing
this work and not just talking about it. First, I use the terms ‘mystical’ and
‘contemplative’ more or less interchangeably throughout this book, with a
preference for ‘contemplative’. While fields outside philosophy are
comfortable talking about medieval mystics and mysticism, philosophers tend
either to be squeamish about those terms and their anti-rationalist
connotations or to associate the terms with projects rather different from
those medieval figures understood themselves to be undertaking. (See
Chapter 1 for further discussion of this phenomenon.) In addition, the label
‘mystical’ is sometimes taken to apply only to reports or accounts of actual
mystical experiences, and ‘mystic’ to apply only to someone who has such
experiences. The set of people who report such experiences, however, does
not overlap neatly with the set of writings and people we today commonly
think of under those descriptions—Meister Eckhart, for instance, is one of the
very few figures familiar to contemporary philosophers as a medieval
mystic, and yet he himself never reports having mystical experiences.
Thomas Aquinas, on the other hand, does report having mystical experiences,
and yet he is thought of today not as a mystic but as a paradigm of analytic
thought. The term ‘contemplative’, on the other hand, doesn’t quite connote
the full range of relevant literature and experiences to most philosophers (or
non-philosophers), who tend to associate contemplation with intellective
activity, and so I use both terms. I do use the term ‘contemplative’ more often
than ‘mystical’, however, both because I want people to start associating the
medieval contemplative tradition with theories about feelings and love as
well as cognition, and because I want to emphasize this tradition’s
connections to its ancient predecessors and to its early modern, modern, and
contemporary successors.
Second, my treatment of topics and figures in this tradition is meant to be
representative rather than exhaustive—a tasting menu, if you will, rather than
a series of full courses. One of my goals while writing this book has been to
keep each of its chapters relatively short and accessible in order to avoid
overwhelming the reader with the sheer volume of primary texts still
available (both in the original languages and in translation) and with the
enormity of secondary literature on these texts available from outside
philosophy. When confronted by seemingly endless shelves full of primary
texts (there are at least forty separate volumes just of English translations in
the ‘Christian Pre-1501’ section of Paulist Press’s Classics of Western
Spirituality, for instance), even well-motivated scholars of medieval
philosophy might well throw up their hands and return to the equally
voluminous but more familiar terrain of Thomas Aquinas. The fact that the
best secondary literature on these texts tends to consist of densely written
600-plus-page tomes (or whole series of 600-plus-page tomes, like Bernard
McGinn’s magisterial seven-volume Presence of God) means that only
people already committed to developing a specialization in this area are
likely to get far enough in to appreciate what the tradition has to offer. For
that reason, although I provide resources for further primary and secondary
research in footnotes and in the bibliography, I try to provide representative
samples of primary texts via relatively succinct quotes, and I generally avoid
engaging secondary research in the main text.
Speaking of quotes, I have chosen to cite mostly primary texts for which
there are high-quality, readily available English translations, and almost all
my quotes come from those English translations. Texts from the later
medieval contemplative tradition are written not just in Latin but in a host of
vernaculars, including Old French, Middle Dutch, fourteenth-century Tuscan,
Franco-Provençal, Middle Low and Middle High German, and Middle
English; it is difficult to access many of these manuscripts, and even print
versions of many of these texts in their original languages are hard to track
down and/or lack critical editions. Since one of my central goals is to
encourage people to engage with this tradition, I’ve stuck to translations and
works which most people should be able to access without too much
difficulty.
Finally, throughout this book I concentrate my attention primarily on
mystics and contemplatives from Western Europe in the thirteenth–fifteenth
centuries.12 This focus is, on one level, arbitrary and porous: I include
Richard of St. Victor (d.1173), for instance, but not Bernard of Clairvaux
(d.1153). (Bernard’s influence is nevertheless felt throughout, particularly
via discussion of the late-thirteenth-century Meditations on the Life of
Christ, which paraphrases a number of sermons from Bernard’s commentary
on the Song of Songs.) I also don’t venture too far into the fifteenth century:
Julian of Norwich and Christine de Pizan take us into the first half of the
1400s, and no discussion of medieval contemplative thought would be
complete without Thomas à Kempis (d.1471), but the Italian Renaissance is
in mid-swing by the fifteenth century. (Dante is dead already in 1321, a full
half-century before Catherine of Siena is even born, and the contemplative
works of Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in the second
half of the fifteenth century display a Platonism that is more humanist than
Augustinian.)
On another level, however, this focus is not arbitrary at all: it
encompasses the height of the production of mystical and contemplative texts
in the Rome-based Christian tradition, a period in which what Herbert
Grundmann famously termed ‘The Women’s Religious Movement’ is at its
height.13 As the number of lay religious movements focused on the
contemplative life explodes, laypeople as well as ecclesiastical and
scholastic authorities become engaged in the search for union with God and
share their insights and personal experiences. The fact that so many women
in this period not only speak but are listened to and taken as spiritual
authorities (as testified to by the sheer number of extant manuscripts) is my
primary reason for focusing on the Christian contemplative tradition over
Jewish or Islamic mystical and contemplative traditions in the thirteenth-
fifteenth centuries, in which women have less of a voice.
Scholastic discussions become increasingly specialized in the thirteenth
century and beyond, leading to the infamous caricature of their being focused
on minutiae such as “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”14
The place where foundational questions about the life worth living—both
theoretical and practical—continue to be asked and investigated in the later
Middle Ages is the contemplative tradition. The resulting wealth of mystical
and contemplative literature should engage anyone interested in the idea of
philosophy as a Way of Life, whether or not you personally share their
religious commitments, for these are people who tried their best to practice
what they believed, to put theoria into praxis—and who see debates about
who we are and how we should live as posing questions whose answers
have potentially eternal consequences.15

* * *
Various bits of this book started life as parts of papers published elsewhere.
In chronological order of publication, those papers are “Self-Knowledge,
Abnegation, and Fulfillment in Medieval Mysticism,” in Self-Knowledge, ed.
U. Renz, Oxford Philosophical Concepts Series (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2016), 131–45; “What has History to do with Philosophy? Insights
from the Medieval Contemplative Tradition,” in Philosophy and the
Historical Perspective, ed. M. Van Ackeren, Proceedings of the British
Academy 214 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 155–70; “‘Many
Know Much, but Do Not Know Themselves’: Self-Knowledge, Humility, and
Perfection in the Medieval Affective Contemplative Tradition,” in
Consciousness and Self-Knowledge in Medieval Philosophy: Proceedings
of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Vol. 14, ed. G. Klima
and A. Hall (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018),
89–106; “The Phenomenology of Immortality (1200–1400),” in The History
of the Philosophy of Mind Vol. 2: Philosophy of Mind in the Early and
High Middle Ages, ed. M. Cameron. (London: Routledge, 2019), 219–39;
“Medieval Mystics on Persons: What John Locke Didn’t Tell You,” in
Persons: a History, ed. A. LoLordo, Oxford Philosophical Concepts Series
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 123–53; “The Voice of Reason:
Medieval Contemplative Philosophy,” Res Philosophica 99/2 (2022), pp.
169–85; “Lewd, Feeble, and Frail: Humility Formulae, Medieval Women,
and Authority,” in Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy Vol. 10 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, forthcoming). My thanks to the relevant publishers
for permission to reproduce material here.

1 For a history of the development of these institutions, see Jon Marenbon’s two-volume Early
Medieval Philosophy: 480–1150 (London: Routledge, 1983) and Later Medieval Philosophy: 1150–
1350 (London: Routledge, 1987).
2 Marenbon’s Medieval Philosophy: An Historical and Philosophical Introduction (London:
Routledge, 2006), for instance, is meant to supersede the two-volume work mentioned in note 1 by
addressing “all four main traditions of medieval philosophy that go back to the same roots in late
antiquity: the Greek Christian tradition, the Latin tradition, the Arabic tradition, and the Jewish tradition
(written in Arabic and in Hebrew)” (Preface, p. 1/i).
3 Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to
Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
4 Rudolph Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Barbara Newman,
God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
 5 This has led to an ongoing heated (if not particularly productive) debate about whether these
figures (especially Aquinas) should be thought of as philosophers at all. Personally, I believe that we’re
better off expanding rather than defending philosophy’s borders. For a similar view, see Peter
Adamson’s “If Aquinas is a philosopher then so are the Islamic theologians” (https://aeon.co/ideas/if-
aquinas-is-a-philosopher-then-so-are-the-islamic-theologians>) and also his Medieval Philosophy: a
History of Philosophy without Any Gaps, Vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
6 The reason for putting scare quotes around ‘Latin’ here is that although church, legal, and
university authorities continue to write in Latin during this period, many of the women discussed in this
book wrote or dictated in their native vernacular.
7 See, e.g., Eileen O’Neill and Marcy Lascano’s Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery
and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought (Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2019);
Christia Mercer’s “Descartes’ Debt to Teresa of Avila, or why we should work on women in the history
of philosophy,” Philosophical Studies 174/10 (2017), pp. 2539–55. See also the resources of Project
Vox at https://projectvox.org/about-the-project/ and New Narratives in the History of Philosophy at
https://www.newnarrativesinphilosophy.net/index.html.
8 Jean Leclercq, Pseudo-Dionisius: the Complete Works, trans. Colm Luiheid (Mahwah: Paulist
Press, 1987), p. 30.
9 Stephen Boulter, Why Medieval Philosophy Matters (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), p.
161. Unfortunately (and egregiously), the book also neglects Greek Byzantine, Islamic, and Jewish
contributions.
10 The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology, ed. E. Howells and M. McIntosh (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2020). For an argument that these omissions and those of similarly
marginalized voices are actively (if unintentionally) pernicious, see my “Review of The Oxford
Handbook of Mystical Theology” in Faith and Philosophy 38 (3) 2021, 396–402.
11 The issue of epistemic injustice in particular has received a great deal of attention in the past
fifteen years or so: who is believed when they speak, and in what contexts and on what subjects? Who
is given the conceptual tools to make sense of their own situations and who lacks them? Two of the
most influential books in this discussion have been Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice: Power and
the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Jose Medina’s The Epistemology
of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
12 Unfortunately, both Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) and Teresa of Avila (1515–82) fall outside
this scope. I highly recommend further examination of both, however, for their important philosophical
and theological insights. See, for starters, Julia Lerius’s “Hildegard von Bingen on Autonomy,” in
Women Philosophers on Autonomy: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. S. Berges and
A. Sinai (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 9–23, and Christia Mercer’s “Descartes’ Debt to Teresa of
Avila.”
13 Grundmann’s groundbreaking 1935 work has been translated and republished as Religious
Movements in the Middle Ages: The Historical Links between Heresy, the Mendicant Orders, and
the Women’s Religious Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Century, with the Historical
Foundations of German Mysticism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995).
14 There is no historical record that this was an actual topic of discussion in the Middle Ages, but
there are a number of discussions about whether or how angels move, and whether or how angels can
occupy spatial location. See, e.g., Thomas Aquinas’s treatise on angels in Summa theologiae Ia 50–64.
 15 For the classic source of the idea of philosophy as a way of life, see Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy
as a Way of Life, ed. Arnold Davison; trans. by Michael Chase (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 1995).
 List of Figures

I1.1. St. Francis, Margaritone d’Arezzo, mid-thirteenth century, Vatican Museum

I1.2. Bridget of Sweden, Master of Soeterbeeck, 1470, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
I1.3. Catherine of Siena, Lorenzo di Pietro, mid-fifteenth century, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena
2.1. Lunette, anonymous, first half of the twelfth century, church of San Giusto, Volterra
2.2. Prudence, Piero del Pollaiolo, 1470, Uffizi Gallery, Florence
2.3. Detail of ‘Sight’ panel of the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, Flemish workshop, c.1500, Musée
de Cluny, Paris
2.4. Esaltazione della Croce, Maestro di Tressa, 1215, Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena
2.5. Lamentation over the Dead Christ, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, 1342–4, Pinacoteca Nazionale di
Siena
I2.1. Entrance into the beguinage of Antwerp, seen from inside
I2.2. Beguinage of Amsterdam, central courtyard, seen from church
3.1. Lady Reason with mirror and laying foundation with Christine, Cité des dames, c.1410–14,
Harley MS 4431, f. 290r, British Library. Reproduced courtesy of the British Library
3.2. Detail of Adoration of the Magi, Andrea Mantegna, mid-fifteenth century, Uffizi Gallery,
Florence
I3.1. Detail of Saint Humility and Scenes from Her Life, Pietro Lorenzetti, c.1335–40, Uffizi
Gallery, Florence
I3.2. Madonna of the Magnificat, Sandro Botticelli, 1483, Uffizi Gallery, Florence
I3.3. Annunciation of Mary with reading tree and multiple books, Orsini Castle, Bracciano
I3.4. St. Catherine of Alexandria, workshop of Jan Crocq, c.1475–1525, Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York
I3.5. The Libyan Sibyl, Guidoccio Cozzarelli c.1482–3, floor of Siena Duomo
I3.6. The “Royal Portal,” 1150–70, west transept, Chartres Cathedral
I3.7. Detail of statuary, c.1225–30, north portal, Reims Cathedral
4.1. Saint Humility and Scenes from Her Life, Pietro Lorenzetti, c.1335–40, Uffizi Gallery,
Florence
4.2. The Holy Family, attributed to Lux Maurus, c.1517–27, Musée de Cluny, Paris
 Detail of Meditationes vitae Christi; ms. Ital. 115, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Credit:
4.3. Johannes de Caulibus, Meditatione de la uita del nostro Signore Ihesu Christo, XIV century.
National Library of France. Department of Manuscripts.
4.4. Detail of Memorial Tablet of Hendrik van Rijn, Johan Maelwael, c.1363, Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam
4.5. Detail of Virgin of the Rose Garden, Master of the Saint Lucy Legend, c.1475–80, Detroit
Institute of Arts Museum
I4.1. Detail of side panel, “Attack on the Castle of Love,” ivory casket, c.1300–25, Musée de Cluny,
Paris
I4.2. Mirror-case with “Attack on the Castle of Love,” Paris workshop, c.1320–40, Museo Nazionale
del Bargello, Florence
I4.3. St. Catherine of Siena Exchanging Hearts with Christ, Guidoccio Cozzarelli, late fifteenth
century, Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena
5.1. Dittico del Beato Andrea Gallerani, verso, detail showing four mendicant pilgrims, Dietisalvi di
Speme, c.1270, Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena
5.2. Detail of tapestry of Arithmetic, Flanders workshop, c.1520, Musée de Cluny, Paris
5.3. Detail of Allegory of Good Government from The Allegory of Good and Bad Government,
Ambrogio Lorenzetti, 1338–9, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena
I5.1. Personified figures of Humility and Pride from illumination of La Somme le Roi, workshop of
Honoré, c.1280
6.1. The Last Judgment, detail of Paradise, Giovanni di Paolo, c.1460–5, Pinacoteca Nazionale di
Siena
 1
Mysticism, Methodology, and Epistemic
Justice

Current efforts to expand the ‘canon’ of the history of philosophy present an

exciting opportunity to reconceptualize how philosophy both has been and is
currently practiced. In drawing attention to voices and methodologies that
have previously been overlooked, these efforts present a vision of
philosophy that more accurately captures its multi-faceted past and points the
way towards a more interesting future. This book is presented in that spirit.
Instead of volunteering ideological nuggets mined from ancient sources or
explicating theories whose value stems in part from their very lack of
connection to current interests, my primary methodological goal is to
highlight a different, corrective and complementary, role that historically
informed philosophy can occupy.1
What follows is corrective in that it challenges existing narratives about
medieval philosophy by debunking the assumption that medieval philosophy
in the ‘Latin West’ happened only in university settings and (thus) that women
didn’t do philosophy in the Middle Ages; it is complementary in adding to
these existing narratives the wide range of philosophical insights contained
in the Christian contemplative tradition from the thirteenth to fifteenth
centuries. (See the Preface for an explanation of my choice of this particular
time period, as well as religious and regional focus.) In engaging the work of
men and women excluded by a narrow focus on scholastic disputations,
moreover, this book also enhances our understanding of medieval philosophy
as it has been traditionally understood, for the authors of those disputations
did not live in isolated bubbles—they lived in complex societies full of
political and religious intrigue and were deeply involved in conversations
that extended far beyond the classroom, conversations that frequently
included women.2
Focusing exclusively on the works of medieval women contemplatives
and mystics would, of course, present as weirdly distorted a picture of these
conversations as has been created by the ‘traditional’ focus on the works of
scholastic men. It would also run the risk of essentializing the status of these
authors as women and/or treating them as providing ‘the feminine
perspective,’ whereas the truth is simply that the contributions of medieval
women have often been overlooked because of their sex, while their
contributions are shaped by their experiences as subjects occupying
particular spaces in the societies in which they wrote.3 As we’ll see
throughout this book, there is often more commonality (in views,
methodology, and interests) between women and men of the same religious
order and geographic region than between women of different religious
orders or centuries; one of my aims is to undermine the idea that there is “a”
way that women address questions of philosophical and religious
significance. Thus, although I do prioritize women’s contributions to
contemplative philosophy in the thirteenth–fifteenth centuries—particularly
in addressing conversations in which the voices of male contemplatives such
as Meister Eckhart have already been relatively well represented—this book
draws on texts authored by women and men from a variety of religious
affiliations, social backgrounds, and geographical regions to address
contemplative views on five topics of interest to both their scholastic
counterparts and to contemporary philosophers: self-knowledge, reason and
its limits, love and the will, persons, and immortality and the afterlife.
Before turning to these topics, however, I want to demonstrate the need
for this book (and the advantages of this corrective and complementary
method) by addressing contemporary philosophical conceptions of mysticism
and what counts as a mystical experience. Many philosophers consider
mysticism too eldritch to be the subject of serious inquiry and rational
argumentation. While contemplative philosophy has a long and respected
history (if one rather marginalized today), mysticism generally counts as
philosophy to scholars in contemporary philosophy departments in the same
way that the crystals and tarot cards in the ‘metaphysics’ sections of
bookstores count as metaphysics—which is to say, it doesn’t. Those
philosophers who do take mysticism seriously as a philosophical topic tend
also to work in other disciplines (such as religious studies, psychology, and
cognitive science) and to operate with conceptions of mysticism and mystical
experience that are heavily indebted to the early twentieth-century theories of
William James and Evelyn Underhill. Yet, as we’ll see in Section 1.1, those
theories discount enormous swaths of reported mystical experiences on the
basis of ideology that is deeply suspicious of embodiment. After laying out a
contemporary definition of ‘mystical experience’ that has inherited these
suspicions, I turn in Section 1.2 to look at the nature and range of mystic
experiences reported in the Rome-based Christian tradition of the thirteenth–
fifteenth centuries. The philosophical motivations given in favor of excluding
physical and affective experiences from the set of “real” mystical
experiences rest both then and now, as we will see, on highly controversial
claims about the natures of both God and human persons. In fact, as I show in
Section 1.3, standard views of mystical experiences in the thirteenth–fifteenth
centuries enthusiastically include embodied and affective experiences in
addition to those that involve non-sensory, selfless union. In Section 1.4 I
explain how broadening contemporary philosophical conceptions of
mysticism and mystical experience can help philosophers engage with
scholars working on similar topics in other disciplines; I conclude in Section
1.5 by presenting an overview of the rest of this book.

1.1 Implicit Assumptions and the Case of ‘Mystical

Experience’

What it takes for an experience to count as mystical has been the source of
significant controversy. Many current definitions of ‘mystical experience’
(particularly those found in analytic philosophy and theology) exclude
embodied, non-unitive states. In so doing, however, they exclude an
enormous group of reported mystical experiences such as visions, auditions,
and other somatic experiences. In the remainder of this section, I explicate
the current standard philosophical conception of mystical experience in light
of its twentieth-century influences, showing how prejudices against women,
emotions, and the body have played a significant role in determining which
sort of reported mystical experiences fall under the contemporary definition
and which do not.
 1.1.1 A standard contemporary definition of ‘mystical
experience’

To do this, I begin where everyone begins their philosophical inquiries these

days: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. As one might expect from
the SEP, the entry on ‘Mysticism’ does an excellent job capturing current
philosophical assumptions about mysticism. Jerome Gellman, its author,
begins with two definitions of ‘mystical experience.’ First, he presents a
“wide definition,” as follows:
A (purportedly) super sense-perceptual or sub sense-perceptual experience granting
acquaintance of realities or states of affairs that are of a kind not accessible by way of sense-
perception, somatosensory modalities, or standard introspection.4

Then he offers a ‘narrow’ definition, which is described as “more

common among philosophers”:
A (purportedly) super sense-perceptual or sub sense-perceptual unitive experience granting
acquaintance of realities or states of affairs that are of a kind not accessible by way of sense-
perception, somatosensory modalities, or standard introspection.5

The only difference between these two definitions is the addition of the word
‘unitive’ in the one characterized as “suiting more specialized treatments of
mysticism in philosophy.” As I discuss in Sections 1.2 and 1.3, however, this
addition is crucial for understanding one of the main ways in which
contemporary philosophical conceptions of mysticism rule out a great deal of
reported mystical experiences.
Both definitions maintain that a mystical experience must be either
‘super’ or ‘sub’ sense-perceptual. To count as ‘super sense-perceptual,’ an
experience must have ‘perception-like content of a kind not appropriate to
sense perception, somatosensory modalities…or standard introspection.’6
That is, although a mystical experience may accompany or even be
occasioned by sense perception (of, for instance, a tremendous
thunderstorm), this definition stipulates that a mystical experience must itself
transcend the senses in a distinctive way. To count as ‘sub sense-
perceptual,’ in turn, an experience must go beyond the senses in the other
direction, so that the experience contains little to no phenomenological
content. (As I discuss in Section 1.2, such experiences are usually seen as the
end achievement of a lengthy process of self-loss or self-annihilation en
route to union with the divine.) Crucially, in insisting that a mystical
experience be either super or sub sense-perceptual, this definition rules out
embodied experiences in which a subject, say, hears God’s voice (as Moses
hears God in the burning bush), or sees visions (as John ‘sees’ the events he
records in Revelations). Gellman is clear that this exclusion is intentional, on
the grounds that this is common philosophical practice: “Generally,
philosophers have excluded purely para-sensual experiences such as
religious visions and auditions from the mystical.”7
The emphasis on the inherently unitive nature of a mystical experience in
the more ‘philosophical’ definition is also significant. Beginning at the outset
of the twentieth century with William James’s discussion of the ‘four marks’
of a mystical experience in Varieties of Religious Experience,8 and
continuing with Evelyn Underhill’s influential ‘five stages of the mystic path’
in her Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development of Man’s
Spiritual Consciousness,9 modern scholars of mysticism have generally
upheld a conception of selfless mystic union as the ultimate end of religious
experience.10 Thus, Underhill talks about a ‘death of selfhood’ in her
depiction of the unitive life, which she describes as the highest and final
stage of the mystic life,11 while Gellman characterizes a unitive mystical
experience as involving ‘phenomenological de-emphasis, blurring, or
eradication of multiplicity.’12 This sort of union utterly transcends awareness
of our bodies and our senses—it is what William Alston refers to as
“extreme mystical experience” in which “all distinctions are transcended,
even the distinction of subject and object.”13 Such union is taken by many
philosophers today to be both necessary for an experience’s being mystical
and the (retroactive) sign of a “true” mystical experience. Yet, I argue, the
requirements of this definition are overly rigid and exclusive.

1.1.2 Debates about mysticism in the twentieth century

The nature of mystical experience was a topic of interest throughout the

twentieth century.14 In the first half, influential scholars such as William
James and Evelyn Underhill focused on the psychological and philosophical
as well as religious aspects of mysticism, and there was a general post-
Freudian and Jungian interest in psychologizing such experiences in order to
uncover their true significance. This combined with the rise of medicine as a
science and increased interest in identifying physical causes for altered
mental states to produce working definitions of ‘mysticism’ and ‘mystical
experiences’ from which physical and affective states were carefully ruled
out—in part due to epistemological worries about how to distinguish genuine
religious experiences from hallucinations or medical conditions such as
epilepsy.
In the post-Auschwitz world of the second half of the twentieth century,
the search for a universal divine that encompasses all outwardly conflicting
world religions gained ground, popularized by works such as Joseph
Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (originally published in 1949)
and W. T. Stace’s Mysticism and Philosophy (1960). This push towards
religious pluralism, epitomized by John Hick’s work in influential volumes
such as The Myth of God Incarnate (1977) and God Has Many Names
(1980), stressed the similarities in descriptions of selfless mystic union
among different religious traditions in order to argue for a common basis for
them all.
A common denominator in many of these modern discussions has been
their dismissal of embodied experiences as inferior to (or even misleading or
counterfeit versions of) “true” mystical experiences. In ruling out these sorts
of experiences, however, treatments of mysticism have discounted many of
the states reported as mystical experiences by women, a great number of
which are embodied in some form or another.15 The assumptions made by
modern philosophers such as Nelson Pike and Steven Katz about the nature
of those experiences worth attention have negatively influenced their
approach (and the approach of those influenced by them) to the much broader
range of experiences considered mystical prior to the twentieth century. As
Grace Jantzen notes in Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism,
contemporary scholars who unquestioningly accept this ‘philosophical’
conception of mysticism err in not asking “whether this is the right focus, or
whether it might seriously distort what the mystic herself considered to be
essential.”16 It has also led to a disproportionate amount of attention paid to
those contemplatives and mystics who emphasize self-loss and annihilative
union, of whom Meister Eckhart is the classic example.
 The dismissal and/or mistrust of female reports of embodied mystical
experience has a long history. According to the widely accepted Aristotelian
biology of the Middle Ages, women’s mental acuity is compromised by their
bodies, which are more sensitive to sensory perception and thus more
susceptible to bodily passions and emotions.17 Although this sensitivity
makes women seem better candidates for certain sorts of religious
experiences (such as visions and physical states such as stigmata and
closure), the belief that their bodies consistently overpower their intellective
capacities simultaneously calls into question their reports and judgments
about such experiences.18 Thus, after the surge in reported mystic
experiences in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the people whose
reports church authorities were most likely to scrutinize closely and then
condemn were predominantly female—a result, no doubt, buoyed by further
persistent cultural and religious beliefs that women are less trustworthy than
men and prone to exaggerate their emotional and physical states.19
Although women and their bodies have been strongly associated both with
each other and with the negative side of the dualistic binary of men/women,
mind/body, reason/emotion, self/other, active/passive, etc. in Western culture
since before the time of Plato, the role this association plays in the exclusion
of embodied states from contemporary philosophical definitions of mystical
experience has been left largely unacknowledged. In many cases, the
association between bodies and women is left implicit, as when Evelyn
Underhill dismisses reports of ecstatic union and other sensory and physical
mystic states as a result of “the infantile craving for a sheltering and
protecting love” that is “frequently pathological.”20 We should be seeking to
transcend our bodies and ourselves, she writes, not wallowing in pleasures
and pains that speak to our personal desires. Underhill claims that somatic
visions and ecstatic experiences are not truly mystical, but instead are
frequently accompanied by other “abnormal conditions” suffered by
“emotional visionaries whose revelations have no ultimate
characteristics.”21 Underhill’s disdain for emotional and physical claims to
mystical experience is clear; what is left unsaid is that the vast majority of
these ‘emotional visionaries’ were women, and that the mystics whose
experiences typify her portrayal of the superior unitive life—which
possesses such ‘ultimate characteristics’ as self-abnegation and
transcendence of physical experience—are almost exclusively male.
 In other cases, however, the negative associations between emotion,
bodies, and women are quite explicit. David Knowles, for example,
describes the ‘pure spirituality’ of the early Middle Ages as “contaminated”
by “a more emotional and idiosyncratic form of devotion…deriving partly
from the influence of some of the women saints of the fourteenth century,
women such as Angela of Foligno, Dorothea of Prussia, and Bridget of
Sweden.”22 Like Underhill, Knowles associates purity of spirituality with an
emphasis on transcendence of the particularities of the body and its affective
states; unlike his predecessor, Knowles makes it clear that the sort of
emotional and individual forms of religious expression which taint the
appropriately dispassionate, universal modes of true mysticism are primarily
the province of women.
Simone de Beauvoir draws the same negative connection between
women, bodies, and emotional religious experiences in her groundbreaking
work of feminist philosophy The Second Sex. In her chapter ‘The Mystic,’
Beauvoir is sharply critical of the reported experiences of the majority of
female medieval mystics: “Not clearly distinguishing reality from make-
believe, action from magic, the objective from the imaginary,” she writes,
“Woman is peculiarly prone to materialize the absent in her own body.”23
Women are more likely than men to report physical mystical experiences, she
argues, because their disadvantaged status as Other has led them to become
more susceptible to religious fervor and extreme emotional states. That is,
having internalized being Other and Inessential, Woman is more likely to
passively embody religious beliefs in physical and emotional suffering or
ecstasy than she is to attempt concrete action in the world of men from which
she has been excluded. In fact, Beauvoir maintains, Woman’s acceptance of
the promise of rewards for an earthly life of obedience in an eternal paradise
is one of the central obstacles that keeps her from working towards
transcendence and self-actualization.24
It seems clear, then, that prejudices against emotions, bodies, and women
have influenced the development of current philosophical conceptions of
what counts as a mystical experience. Jerome Gellman, the author of the
working definition quoted above, himself admits that “the thinking that there
is a common, unconstructed, essence to mystical experience has worked
against the recognition of women’s experiences as properly mystical.”26 It
does not seem, however, that Gellman thinks this is a cause for particular
concern, much less a signal that the definition he has offered might be faulty.
As Grace Jantzen observes, “Contemporary philosophers are seduced by a
particular picture of mysticism, inherited largely from William James, which
involves them in a stately dance of claims and counterclaims about
experience and interpretation, language and ineffability, credulity and
doubt…what is hardly ever noticed is how little resemblance they bear to the
things which preoccupied the medieval men and women whom they
themselves would consider to be paradigm mystics.”25 Yet it seems to me
that the way in which these problematic assumptions undergird contemporary
conceptions of mysticism demonstrates the need for a serious re-examination
of both the definition and how it is applied.

1.2 Apophatic Self-Abnegation

It would be convenient to think that the negative associations of body,

emotion, and women have always worked against the inclusion of embodied,
affective experiences in the mystical canon—we like to think of ourselves
today, after all, as more enlightened and open-minded than our historical
predecessors. It would be convenient to think this, yes, but it would be
wrong. Although there is a strain within the medieval Christian
contemplative tradition that excludes embodied experiences from what it
considers ‘true’ mystical experiences—namely apophaticism, which focuses
on the ineffability of the divine and the inability of language and thought to
express any direct experience of that divine—this strain is only one among
many. Cautions against physical and affective states from within this strain
need to be understood in the larger context in which such embodied states
were actually seen as the mystic norm. In addition, as I argue in Section 1.3,
the reasons those states were accepted as the norm should be taken quite
seriously.
The apophatic tradition in Western Christianity has a long philosophical
lineage, arguably beginning with Plato’s claims about the nature of the Good
in the Republic and continuing in the early Middle Ages via figures such as
pseudo-Dionysius and John Scotus Eriugena, and in relation to the Islamic
and Jewish mystic traditions developing at the same time. In the thirteenth
century and onward, medieval apophaticism is typified in the works of
Marguerite Porete, Meister Eckhart, and the anonymous English Cloud of
Unknowing; it continues post-Reformation most prominently in the writings
of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. During the centuries in which
mysticism flourished as a form of religious expression and in which it
(arguably) found its fullest form, however, apophaticism was a non-dominant
tradition, and one often seen as bordering on heresy. This fact, of course,
makes no difference for the philosophical plausibility of the view; what is
significant is that, in positing a selfless merging with an unknowable God as
the ultimate end of human existence, apophatically minded contemplatives
make highly controversial assumptions about both God and the ultimate goal
of life.
Apophatic contemplatives tend to describe the spiritual life as a series of
stages that we move through in a journey towards unknowing union with the
unknowable divine. On this journey, one of the most important tasks is the
process of cultivating self-abnegation, or radical self-loss. In The Mirror of
Simple Souls, for instance, Marguerite Porete explains that union with God
requires the complete elimination of the conscious self. In the perfect state of
such union, “All things are one for her, without an explanation (propter
quid), and she is nothing in a One of this sort.” All the individualizing
activities of the soul—thought, will, emotion—cease: “The Soul has nothing
more to do for God than God does for her. Why? Because He is, and she is
not. She retains nothing more of herself in nothingness, because He is
sufficient of Himself, because He is and she is not.” In the ultimate
expression of annihilative union, “She is stripped of all things because she is
without existence, where she was before she was created.”27 This stress on
self-abnegation runs throughout Porete’s work: annihilation of individuality
is essential for the highest form of union with God.
Meister Eckhart also frequently exhorts his listeners to detach themselves
from all individual affections and desires, in preparation for the self-
abnegation that allows God to be all. In Counsel 23, he states: “There is still
one work [after the soul has detached itself from worldly concerns] that
remains proper and his own, and that is annihilation of self.”28 It is often
unclear in such texts precisely how to understand this self-abnegation (is it
meant to be understood literally or metaphorically, ontologically or
phenomenologically?), but the stress on removing any sense of self that might
impede complete union with God is consistent throughout the apophatic
tradition. In extreme cases, apophatic mystics even portray self-abnegation as
allowing for an identity of the mystic with God; when no egoistic self
remains, one can be filled with God to the point where one becomes God.
(For further discussion, see Section 5.2.)
Given this emphasis on eliminating all sense of individual selfhood, it is
not surprising that apophatic texts frequently caution their readers against
taking physical and emotional states to be signs of mystic union. Such states
may indicate a sort of spiritual progress, but they are not themselves either
necessary or sufficient for attaining the goal of the contemplative life. The
anonymous English Cloud of Unknowing, for instance, advises us to
“Mistrust all consolations, sounds, gladness, and sweet ecstasies that come
suddenly and externally.”29 In his late-fourteenth-century The Scale of
Perfection, Walter Hilton also warns against accepting physical sensations
as signs of true mystic union, whether “by sounding of the ear, or savoring in
the mouth, smelling at the nose, or else any sensible heat like a fire glowing
and warming the breast or any other part of the body.” Such an experience, he
writes, “though it be ever so comfortable and liking,” is not itself true
contemplation but is, rather, “simple and secondary” to the knowing and
loving of God that accompanies the real thing.30 This is a direct jab at
Richard Rolle’s earlier Fire of Love, which describes Rolle’s mystical
experiences as including physical warmth in his body (especially his chest),
a sense of surpassing sweetness, and the sound of celestial music. The Cloud
of Unknowing takes aim at Rolle’s ‘fire of love’ as well, attributing such
embodied experiences to novices who “mistake a high-strung excitement and
warmth in their cheeks for the genuine fire of love kindled by the grace and
goodness of the Holy Spirit deep within our hearts.”31 The Cloud even goes
on to caution that such experiences might have sinister origins: “The devil
has his own contemplatives, just as God does.”32 Meister Eckhart, in turn,
“tartly condemn[s] those who want to see God with the same eyes with
which they behold a cow.”33
In all these cases, God is characterized as utterly unknowable and, at least
for Eckhart and Porete, beyond being itself. Experience of such a God
necessarily transcends physical and affective experience: for many
apophatics, it entails the loss of individual experience altogether. On the
view according to which human beings reach their ultimate end by perfecting
the act of self-annihilation, the highest form of mystical union is one in which
neither human beings nor God exist in standard ways. In part because of this,
apophaticism was never the leading mystical tradition in the medieval
period. Instead, the dominant tradition was a more body-friendly and
affective mysticism—a mysticism embraced by a large variety of religious
communities throughout Europe during the thirteenth–fifteenth centuries (the
point at which Western Christian contemplative movements were at their
height). I turn now to a closer examination of this tradition.

1.3 Correcting via Complementing: Embracing Embodied

Experiences

As we saw in Section 1.1, affective mysticism has often been dismissed

because of its association with the body and with emotions. Ruling out
affective experiences as properly mystical for this reason, however, is to
miss the significance of such reported forms of connection with the divine.
Human beings are physical and affective as well as intellective and
volitional beings: our primary interaction with reality—created and divine—
is physical. Whereas the apophatic tradition urges us to transcend those
modes of interaction, the affective tradition encourages us to delve more
deeply into them. Once we recognize the problematic prejudices that shaped
the contemporary conception of mystical experience and the controversial
philosophical assumptions underlying the apophatic exclusion of embodied
experiences, we are in a position to see the rich history of embodied mystical
experiences reported in the Middle Ages as offering a vital complement to
the narrow range of religious experiences which currently serve as the main
focus of analytic philosophers and theologians.
The medieval emphasis on embodied contemplative experiences
developed in part as a response to twelfth-century gnostic movements that
either denied or de-emphasized Christ’s humanity and taught the need for
purifying our immaterial souls from the inherently corrupt material realm. In
other words, the push to transcend our bodies in apophatic mystical union
was viewed as displaying an important misunderstanding of both God and
human nature. In the mainstream contemplative tradition, figures as diverse in
education, social status, and geographical location as Hadewijch (a Flemish
Augustinian), Catherine of Siena (an Italian Dominican), Richard Rolle (an
English hermit), Marguerite d’Oingt (a French Carthusian nun), and Angela
of Foligno (an Italian Franciscan) viewed altered physical states such as
mystic death or bodily ‘closure,’ emotional states such as uncontrollable
weeping or laughter, and parasensory states such as visions and auditions not
as distracting from true mystic union but as important ways of experiencing a
direct connection with the God who had become incarnate for us.
One sign that this tradition understood the spiritual subject as a holistic
union of body and soul (as opposed to a soul seeking to rise above the
material realm) is its reliance on the imagination. In the thirteenth century and
onward, the imagination was generally taken to be the faculty of the human
soul that stores mental ‘pictures’ formed via information collected by the
external senses and then is able to combine those images in both familiar and
unfamiliar ways. In a popular spiritual exercise of the time called
‘meditation’ (meditatio), contemplatives were encouraged to imagine
themselves present at key moments of Christ’s life, particularly his Passion;
the explicit purpose of these exercises was to generate certain sorts of
affective responses that would deepen the subject’s devotion. (See Chapter 4
for further discussion of both the role of imagination and the medieval
practice of meditation.)
This use of the imagination in spiritual exercises was also closely linked
with the idea of ‘spiritual vision’ (visio spiritualis), a concept borrowed
from the Augustinian Platonic tradition. In contrast both to the sort of material
vision (via the eye) which is directed at physical objects and to the sort of
intellective vision (via reason) which is directed at divine truths, spiritual
vision is directed at images held in the imagination. As such, it mediates
between our physical sense capacities and our intellective and volitional
capacities; physical experiences and intellective experiences come together
and are combined in significant ways in spiritual vision (also associated in
this tradition with the ‘inner senses’ and the ‘inner body’). In the affective
mystical tradition, meditative exercises such as imagining oneself present at
the birth of Jesus enable the inner senses to undergo spiritual experiences
with transformative physical and intellective/volitional effects. Such
meditation helps us to “construct an inner space that creates affectively
embodied access to the divine.”34
Because strong emotion was closely linked in the later Middle Ages both
to bodies and to our ability to imagine things vividly (driving us to deeper
devotion and closer communion with God), it was particularly welcomed in
forms of religious expression that celebrated Christ’s Incarnation. Rather
than being discounted as the result of overexcited sensory capacities, the
mystical visions, auditions, smellings, tastings, etc. associated with such
emotions were generally understood to be important spiritual experiences,
and valued as such.35 Embodied mystical experiences were seen as
connecting the human subject to God in ways that enhanced rather than
abnegated our distinctive humanity. In the words of Catherine Walker Bynum,
“All Christ’s members—eyes, breasts, lips and so on—were seen as
testimony to his humanation, and the devout soul responded to this enfleshing
with all its bodily capabilities.”36
A striking example of this can be found in a vision of Hadewijch which
she reports receiving during a celebration of the Eucharist—a particularly
significant act in the medieval affective tradition, since it involves a
connection between Christ and the worshiper that is both mystical and
physical.37 Hadewijch writes that Christ appeared to her “in the form and
clothing of a Man, as he was on the day when he gave us his Body for the
first time” (that is, at the Last Supper).38 Christ then shares himself with
Hadewijch, first via the elements (“he gave himself to me in the shape of the
Sacrament, in its outward form, as the custom is; and then he gave me to
drink from the chalice, in form and taste, as the custom is”), and then in
human form: “After that he came himself to me, took me entirely in his arms,
and pressed me to him; and all my members felt his in full felicity, in
accordance with the desire of my heart and my humanity.” This embrace is
not the end of Hadewijch’s experience, however. After she enjoys Christ’s
presence for a brief time, she writes that “I saw him completely come to
naught and so fade and all at once dissolve that I could no longer recognize
or perceive him outside me, and I could no longer distinguish him within me.
Then it was to me as if we were one without difference.”
This account begins with not just one but two different sorts of embodied
union with Christ, and it is significant that Hadewijch describes it as
fulfilling the desire of her humanity. (See Chapter 5 for further discussion of
this vision.) Even when she reports the later experience of being “one
without difference,” the metaphor at play is one of physical digestion: Christ
has become one with her (and she with him) in the way that food and drink
become one with us—part of our very being. Hadewijch also sometimes
describes mystical union that involves a loss of self, but she consistently
does so without downplaying the significance of affective and embodied
experiences.39
This acknowledgment of the importance of physicality for human subjects
is present in Hadewijch’s letters as well. In one particularly striking
depiction of union with the divine, for instance, she describes how mystical
union can also involve eternal self-preservation:
Where the abyss of his wisdom is, God will teach you what he is, and with what wondrous
sweetness the loved one and the Beloved dwell one in the other, and how they penetrate each
other in a way that neither of the two distinguishes himself from the other. But they abide in one
another in fruition, mouth in mouth, heart in heart, body in body, and soul in soul, while one sweet
divine nature flows through both and they are both one thing through each other, but at the same
time remain two different selves – yes, and remain so forever.40

Another striking portrayal of physical and self-preserving mystical union can

be found in Marguerite d’Oingt, who reports a vision in which she is a
withered tree which is turned completely upside down and then renewed by a
torrent of water rushing down from a nearby mountain. (See Subsection 2.2.3
for the medieval contemplative use of ‘tree’ metaphors to signify the self.)
Having drawn the ‘living water’ (that is, Christ) into herself, Marguerite sees
the names of the five senses written on her newly revived leaves.41 The
vision represents both union with God, as the water saturates every aspect of
the tree, and the corresponding renewal of the tree of self—in body as well
as in spirit.
The rest of this book has much more to say about apophatic and affective
strains of medieval mysticism and contemplativism. Just this brief discussion
should make it clear, however, that ongoing debates concerning the nature
and role of religious and mystical experiences would benefit from
considering the entire range of reported mystical experiences rather than
focusing exclusively on super- or sub-perceptual experiences. Indeed, as
Hadewijch’s vision demonstrates, even a focus on unitive mystical
experiences need not rule out consideration of embodied and affective
mystical states.

1.4 Philosophical Morals and Historical Narratives

To this point, I have focused on the corrective and complementary roles that
historically oriented approaches can play in philosophical discussions, and
on the particular ways in which this book offers both complement and
correction to existing scholarship in medieval philosophy. There is an
additional benefit to including the contemplative tradition in discussions of
medieval philosophy, however, that it is far from unimportant—namely, the
way in which taking a more inclusive approach to what counts as a mystical
experience opens exciting avenues of engagement with scholars working in
other disciplines.
Consider again the contemporary philosophical understanding of mystical
experience discussed in Section 1.1, which is specifically characterized as
“suiting more specialized treatments of mysticism in philosophy” in its focus
on unitive experiences. What is it about the addition of the word ‘unitive’
that makes this definition particularly suited to philosophical examination?
The answer, I think, is just that it helps pick out the particular range of super-
or sub-sensory experiences that analytic philosophers became interested in
over the course of the twentieth century. And, as we saw in Section 1.1,
philosophical interest in that particular range of experiences is impacted by
negative associations with affective and embodied experiences and with
women. Furthermore, as we saw in Section 1.2, the strain of medieval
mysticism and contemplativism that seems to share the perspective of those
analytic philosophers most closely (namely, apophaticism) was the exception
rather than the rule in its own day. Claiming that this narrow range of
perspectives represents how mystical experiences have ‘always been
understood’ ignores the vast majority of reports of such experiences. Think
of that as the corrective stick. Here, then, is the complementary carrot:
enlarging the scope of what philosophers include under their mystical
umbrella would allow us to engage in meaningful and productive
conversations with scholars in a variety of other disciplines.
Any number of other fields already include embodied experiences in their
working conceptions of medieval mysticism and contemplativism, including
political science, history, religious studies, sociology, medieval studies,
theology, art and art history, gender and women’s studies, English, French,
and Italian literature, and more. In the remainder of this book, I follow their
example, adopting Nicholas Watson’s characterization of mystical
experiences as generally phenomenological (“concerning individual felt
experience in addition to systems of knowledge or belief”) and transcendent
(“involving an encounter—whether direct or mediated, transformatively
powerful or paradoxically everyday—with God”).42
The fact that philosophers have set their parameters so narrowly in their
discussions has in turn led to the exclusion of philosophers from most of the
ongoing inter- and intradisciplinary conversations about mysticism. The
Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, for instance, contains
essays by twenty-two scholars who represent thirteen distinct disciplines—
but there is not a single philosopher among them. The reason for this is
simple: the standard conception of mystical experience that philosophers are
working with corresponds so poorly to what everyone else is talking about
that there is almost no point in trying to engage in a common conversation.43
Philosophers excel at biting bullets, and this complete lack of engagement
with other disciplines might be one on which some would happily clamp
down. One of the central goals of this book, however, is to show what
philosophy would lose out on as a result.

1.5 Looking Ahead

The remainder of this book is divided into five chapters and five interludes.
Each chapter focuses on a topic of enduring philosophical interest
(respectively, self-knowledge, reason and its limits, love and the will, the
nature of persons, and immortality and the afterlife). Each interlude focuses
on a question the answer to which provides an important piece of historical,
artistic, and/or literary context for subjects discussed in the main chapters.
Each of the chapters and interludes is framed so that it can stand on its own,
allowing readers to jump in (and out) according to their particular interests
and needs. That said, each successive chapter builds on the previous one(s)
in a way that allows the whole to be much greater than the sum of its
individual parts. What follows is an overview of the remaining five chapters.
One of the very few theses on which there was widespread contemplative
agreement in the twelfth–fifteenth centuries is that self-knowledge constitutes
the grounds or precondition for our future moral and spiritual growth—
everything from the development of individual virtues to achievement of our
final end as human beings. The centrality of self-knowledge for the
contemplative project raises the practical questions, though, of both what it is
and how we are meant to attain it. Chapter 2 addresses the range of answers
medieval mystics and contemplatives provide to these questions. After
establishing a general sense of what self-knowledge is and why we want it, I
lay out three of the most common recommendations medieval contemplatives
give for how to acquire it: ‘look outside yourself to know yourself,’ ‘root
down in humility to rise up in dignity,’ and ‘use reason and imagination to
counter selfish pride.’ Although contemplatives agree about the importance
of self-knowledge, they disagree sharply about the final purpose of
introspection and self-examination; I thus conclude the chapter by laying out
the differing ends towards which contemplatives advise applying this
knowledge—ends that range from relinquishing any individual sense of self
to merge with God to preparing us for complete self-fulfillment via union
with God.
Self-knowledge relies on our ability to reason, but the continued use of
reason within the contemplative life is highly controversial, with some
contemplatives—particularly those in the apophatic tradition—arguing that
we need to abandon reason entirely to reach our final end. This has
contributed to the perception that reason is inimical to medieval mystical and
contemplative projects; it has also created the impression of an unbridgeable
rift between the projects of medieval scholastic philosophy and of medieval
mysticism. In Chapter 3 I argue that this perception is misleading in at least
two important ways. First, even contemplative texts which ultimately
advocate abandoning reason and knowledge (such as Porete’s Mirror,
Meister Eckhart’s Counsels, and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing) affirm
intellect’s role in getting the mystical project off the ground and progressing
to the point where reason can be transcended. Second, any number of
contemplatives portray reason not as something to be overcome or
relinquished but as one of the most important ways in which we resemble or
‘image’ God and, thus, as a crucial point of connection between human
beings and the divine.
At the same time that reason plays a much more important role in the
medieval mystical and contemplative tradition than usually acknowledged,
the increasingly specialized and technical nature of university discussions in
the thirteenth century, together with earlier religious reforms that took a great
deal of religious authority from lay members of the church, leads to
widespread frustration with formal education and scientia (knowledge
gained via natural reason and argumentation). Partly in response, love—
which is available to everyone—becomes identified as the central
component of the contemplative life in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
A primary question in many contemplative texts from this period thus
becomes ‘How we can train our wills to love the right things in the right
way?’ In Chapter 4 I address the will’s general role in human life in relation
to our soul’s other relevant faculties: intellect, imagination, and sensation and
sense appetite. The spiritual exercise of imaginative meditation becomes
particularly important to contemplative practice in this period, for it is seen
as inspiring love, encouraging virtue, and increasing knowledge. Meditation
also serves as a bridge between our ordinary experience of the material
world and our transcendent experience of the immaterial God in higher
levels of contemplation. Importantly, as I discuss at the end of the chapter,
this focus on imaginative meditation and love also creates space in which
women, who are seen as better at loving and more closely connected with
embodiment, can speak with authority about their religious experiences. As
the highest form of contemplation is increasingly identified as union with
God via love, women become increasingly accepted as contemplatives.
In Chapter 5 I take a step back to look at what, exactly, “we” are
understood to be in this tradition—not just as human beings, but as persons, a
category that includes all rational beings, including God. By the outset of the
thirteenth century, the term ‘persona’ already had a long history in logical,
legal, and theological contexts. The overlapping but distinct connotations the
word ‘persona’ assumes in those contexts boil down to three central
concepts: individuality, dignity, and rationality, understood broadly to
include the full range of rational capacities. These three concepts combine in
the contemplative tradition with the use of first- and second-person
perspectives, personification, and introspection to yield a complex and rich
understanding of who we are and what it is to be a person. As I discuss at the
end of the chapter, this concept of person also prefigures both Locke’s
famous seventeenth-century definition and influences the development of the
philosophical theory of personalism.
Scholastic and mystical/contemplative traditions during this time share a
common focus on the final or ultimate end for human beings. While scholastic
discussions tend to focus on metaphysics and mechanics, however,
contemplative and mystical works contain a wealth of first-person
speculations about and reports of union with God. Those reports ground a set
of expectations for experiences of immortality and the afterlife that range all
the way from a transcendent merging with the divine that involves a complete
loss of sense of self and individuality to a deeply intimate experience that
nevertheless preserves a sense of self. In Chapter 6 I argue that we can
understand these views as forming the extreme endpoints of what I call an
‘experiential continuum of immortality.’ This continuum proves useful not
only for understanding the range of views medieval contemplatives hold
about immortality and the afterlife but also for situating scholastic accounts
of immortality, as I demonstrate at the close of the chapter, using the cases of
Robert Grosseteste and Thomas Aquinas.
A single book can only begin to explore the wealth of philosophical
resources contained in the Christian contemplative tradition of the thirteenth–
fifteenth centuries. In the Afterword, I spell out some directions for future
research on this topic, suggesting further ways in which traditional narratives
can be enhanced and corrected by drawing on medieval contemplatives.

Interlude One
 Who Is This Book About?

A timeline of major figures and works, organized by approximate date of

death.

1150

Richard of St. Victor (d.1173): Augustinian monk of the Victorines, a

renowned twelfth-century school of mysticism begun by Hugh of St. Victor
(d.1141). Most influential contemplative works are the Mystical Ark (also
known as the Benjamin Major) and the Twelve Patriarchs (also known as
the Benjamin Minor).

1200

Francis of Assisi (1182–1226): founder of the Franciscan mendicant order.

His emphasis on radical poverty, humility, and love for all of God’s
creatures sets the standard for Franciscan piety. Best-known work is perhaps
The Canticle of the Sun, although his Regulae (which includes the Earlier
Rule in 1221 and Later Rule in 1223) and Testament are foundational
documents for the Franciscan Order. Usually shown with the stigmata, as in
Figure I1.1.
Figure I1.1 St. Francis, Margaritone d’Arezzo, mid-thirteenth century,
Vatican Museum.

Clare of Assisi (1194–1253): founder of the Poor Clares, the order of

Franciscan nuns. Stalwart champion of the right to poverty for her nuns; her
most influential contemplative writings are her four letters to Agnes of
Prague.

1250

Hadewijch (active mid-thirteenth century): Flemish author (and likely

beguine) known as the first great ‘love mystic’ of the Middle Ages.
Influences Jan van Ruusbroec and Meister Eckhart, among others. Her
writing reveals familiarity with a number of Latin philosophical and
theological works (including those by Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, and
Hugh and Richard of St. Victor), although she herself is one of the first
authors to write in Middle Dutch. Extant work includes letters, poetry, and
visionary literature.
Bonaventure (c.1217–74): Italian Franciscan friar, Master of Theology
at the University of Paris, and eventually Minister General of the Franciscan
order. Author of numerous scholastic as well as contemplative texts;
influential contemplative works include The Mind’s Journey to God, The
Three-fold Way, and The Tree of Life.
Thomas Aquinas (1224/5–74): Italian Dominican friar, Master of
Theology at the University of Paris; best-known works are the massive
Summa theologiae and Summa contra gentiles. Account of the Beatific
Vision greatly influences later contemplative conceptions of the afterlife and
is immortalized in Dante’s Paradiso.
Mechthild of Magdeburg (c.1207–82): controversial German beguine
with Dominican affiliations who eventually settles at the convent of Helfta,
Germany, where she influences Mechthild of Hackeborn and Gertrude the
Great. Although she appears to have been known Latin, she writes The
Flowing Light of the Godhead in Middle Low German and incorporates a
variety of different genres across its seven books, including prayers,
dialogues, poetry, and visionary literature.
Mechthild of Hackeborn (c.1241–98): German nun at the famous
convent of Helfta (associated today with both the Cistercian and Benedictine
Orders; by Mechthild’s day, the convent had Dominican spiritual directors).
Her Book of Special Grace—a book focused on her visions and revelations,
many of which were collected and written down by her sisters (including
Gertrude the Great)—is composed in Latin and translated into a number of
vernaculars. Although widely read in its own time, The Book of Special
Grace has less long-term influence than the works of Gertrude.

1300

Gertrude the Great (1256–1301/2): German nun at the convent of Helfta.

Influential in her own time, her writing receives renewed interest in the
sixteenth–seventeenth centuries. Most famous works are The Herald of
Divine Love (composed of five books, some of which appear to be written
by her fellow nuns, as with Mechthild of Hackeborn’s Book of Special
Grace) and her Spiritual Exercises, both written in Latin.
Angela of Foligno (c.1248–1309): originally a wealthy woman in
Foligno, Umbria (near Assisi), Angela experiences a radical conversion
following the death of her husband and children and devotes the remainder of
her life to Franciscan poverty and religious devotion, living as a tertiary (that
is, a member of the ‘Third Order’ of Franciscans, composed of non-
cloistered laypeople). She dictates her highly influential Memorial and
Instructions in her native Umbrian to a monk from Assisi, who transcribes
and edits them in Latin. (This monk is identified in manuscripts only as
‘Brother A’ but traditionally identified as her cousin, Brother Arnauld.)
Marguerite d’Oingt (c.1240–1310): extremely rare example of a
medieval Carthusian nun whose writings have survived. A well-known
French mystic and contemplative in her own time, she dwelt on the common
human experiences of Christ as a means of connecting more deeply with God.
She writes her Page of Meditations in Latin and her remaining works (a
number of letters, the Life of the Blessed Beatrice of Ornacieux, and her
Mirror) in Franco-Provençal.
Marguerite Porete (d.1310): French religious woman (likely a solitary
beguine) burnt at the stake for heresy on June 1, 1310, after a lengthy
imprisonment and trial by the Dominican Inquisitor William of Paris. Her
controversial Mirror of Simple Souls (which states that the noble soul has no
need of the mediation of the Church once it has reached a certain stage of
spiritual purification) influences what’s often referred to as ‘Rhineland
mysticism’ via Meister Eckhart, who resided at the Dominican house in Paris
during her imprisonment and trial.
Meister Eckhart (c.1260–1327/8): Dominican friar known as the
greatest of the ‘Rhineland mystics’; Eckhart serves as Master of Theology at
Paris and also ministers in Strasbourg to Dominican convents and beguines.
Writes both scholastic and contemplative texts and preaches both Latin and
German sermons; many of the German sermons remain extant today because
they were written down by beguines and nuns for later study and
transmission.
Richard Rolle (c.1300–49): English hermit whose works are written in
the vernacular and widely read through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
particularly The Form of Living and Fire of Love, which celebrates
embodied mystical experiences such as hearing music, smelling sweet things,
seeing light, and feeling warmth of love in the chest.

1350

Margaret Ebner (c.1291–1351): German Dominican nun at the Monastery

of Maria Medingen near Dillingen who influences Johannes Tauler and other
‘Rhineland mystics.’ Her surviving works, written in Middle High German,
include her Revelations, a journal, and extensive correspondence with Henry
of Nördlingen (a central figure in the Friends of God [Gottesfreunde]
movement).
Johannes Tauler (c.1300–61): German Dominican friar and one of the
‘Rhineland mystics’ who preached regularly to beguines and other holy
women in Strasbourg as part of the cura monialium that became part of the
pastoral duty of the friars in the mid-thirteenth century. Deeply influenced by
his teacher, Meister Eckhart, Tauler was himself influential as a leader in of
the Friends of God (Gottesfreunde) movement, which emphasized attention
to the inner person over outer works.
Henry Suso (c.1295–1366): Swiss-German Dominican follower of
Meister Eckhart and—together with Eckhart and Tauler—one of the most
influential ‘Rhineland mystics.’ Writes the tremendously popular Little Book
of Eternal Wisdom in Middle High German; subsequently reworks and
translates this into Latin as the Clock of Wisdom (Horologium Sapientiae),
whose popularity becomes even more widespread in the following century.
Bridget or Birgitta of Sweden (c.1303–73): Swedish Franciscan tertiary
and mother of eight (her second daughter is also sainted in the Roman
Catholic church), who affiliates herself with the Franciscan order after the
death of her husband. Founds the Brigittine Order, which involves a ‘double
monastery’ in which men and women live in separate cloisters but work
together. Works zealously for church reform in Rome and is often represented
writing her major work, the massive Latin Revelations. (See Figure I1.2.)
Figure I1.2 Bridget of Sweden, Master of Soeterbeeck, 1470, Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York.

Catherine of Siena (1347–80): the twenty-fourth child of a Sienese

cloth-dyer, Catherine dedicates herself to religious devotion at an early age,
refusing to marry and fighting for the right to join her local Mantallate (part
of the Dominican ‘Third Order’—a group of religious women who wore the
habit of Dominican nuns but lived in their own homes under the direction of a
prioress). Spends much of her short life mediating between various political
and religious factions (most notably interceding with the pope to end the
Avignon papacy and then working to heal the Western Papal Schism).
Dictates over 300 letters to various political and religious figures in her
vernacular Italian and dictates (and then edits) her enormously influential
Dialogue—a conversation between her soul and God—in 1377–8. She is one
of only four women recognized today as a Doctor of the Catholic Church.
Usually shown in a Dominican habit and with the stigmata, as in Figure I1.3.

Figure I1.3 Catherine of Siena, Lorenzo di Pietro, mid-fifteenth century,

Palazzo Pubblico, Siena.

Jan van Ruusbroec (1293–1381): Flemish mystic (often grouped with

the ‘Rhineland mystics’) whose best-known work is The Book of Spiritual
Espousals, written in Middle Dutch. Influenced by Hadewijch and Meister
Eckhart, van Ruusbroec is influential in turn for his Trinitarian theology and
emphasis on the transformation of the inner person rather than external
works.
The Cloud of Unknowing (c.1349–c.1395): anonymous Middle English
contemplative text that stresses an apophatic approach to the spiritual life;
typically paired with The Book of Privy Counselling and thought to be
composed by the same author as The Pursuit of Wisdom (a much-abbreviated
translation/paraphrase into Middle English of Richard of St. Victor’s The
Twelve Patriarchs/Benjamin Minor).
Walter Hilton (c.1340–96): English Augustinian mystic and author of the
popular Scale of Perfection (written in Middle English) as well as perhaps
The Epistle on the Mixed Life. Probably best known for his emphasis on
transcending physical sensations to reach apophatic union with God and
critique of Richard Rolle’s celebration of embodied mystical experiences.

1400

Julian of Norwich (1342/3–c.1416): English anchorite whose given name

has been lost (‘Julian’ comes from the church to which her cell was
attached). Writes her famous Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and
Revelation of Divine Love in Middle English. Sometimes grouped together
as the Showings, Julian’s writing includes both a “short text,” written soon
after the formative vision she has in 1373, and a “long text,” written in the
twenty years or so following the initial vision (and which expands on and
explains the revelations of the shorter text). Likely influenced by Birgitta of
Sweden and by Catherine of Siena, whose works were translated into
Middle English at a nearby convent; Julian’s emphasis on God’s love and
Trinitarian theology is important for the development of later English
spirituality.
Christine de Pizan (1364–c.1430): born in Venice but a resident of Paris
for the majority of her life; widowed at an early age, she becomes one of the
first women authors known to have earned a living writing under her own
name. Most influential work is The City of Ladies (written in French and
published by 1405), which draws on a number of philosophical and literary
sources in making its case for the equality of women, including Boethius’s
Consolation of Philosophy and Boccaccio’s On Famous Women.

1450

Thomas à Kempis (c.1380–1471): German-Dutch member of the ‘Devotio

Moderna’ movement, which stressed humility, obedience, and simple living
based on the model of the life of Christ; influenced by the Brethren of the
Common Life movement, having studied at their school in Deventer (as did
Nicholas of Cusa and Erasmus). Wrote the enormously popular De
Imitatione Christi in Latin in the first half of the fifteenth century.
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94): Italian nobleman and
humanist whose most famous work is the Oration on the Dignity of Man.
Marsilio Ficino (1433–99): Italian Platonist and humanist, translates
Plato’s complete works into Latin and writes the Theologia Platonica.

1 For discussion of these two extremes, as well as a different alternative than the one I lay out here,
see Dominik Perler’s “The Alienation Effect in the Historiography of Philosophy,” in Philosophy and
the Historical Perspective. Proceedings of the British Academy 214, ed. M. Van Ackeren (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 140–54.
2 For a series of engaging bite-sized windows into this world, see Peter Adamson’s Medieval
Philosophy: A history of philosophy without any gaps, Volume 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2019).
3 For discussion of the tensions inherent in drawing attention to the work of under-studied women,
see the Introduction to Sara Poor’s Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book: Gender and the
Making of Textual Authority (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
4 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mysticism/, section 1.1.
5 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mysticism/, section 1.2.
6 Text elided: “including the means for sensing pain and body temperature, and internally sensing
body, limb, organ, and visceral positions and states,” section 1.1.
7 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mysticism/, section 1.1.
8 Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Gifford Lectures held at
Harvard, 1902.
9 Underhill, for instance, describes the final stage of the mystic path (which she bases on John of
the Cross’s writings) as the ‘unitive life.’ See Underhill’s Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and
Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal
Library, 1911) and The Essentials of Mysticism and Other Essays (New York: Dutton, 1920). The
previous four stages are, respectively, ‘awakening of self,’ ‘purgation of self,’ ‘illumination,’ and ‘the
dark night of the soul.’
10 Whether this loss of self should be understood metaphorically, ontologically, or phenomenologically
is the subject of much debate. For our purposes, what is significant is merely that such union is
understood to erase any distinction between the consciousness of the individual having the mystic
experience and the divine.
11 See Underhill, Mysticism, p. 444.
12 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mysticism/.
 13 William Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1991), p. 24. Alston himself adopts a perceptual model of religious experiences that
allows for a wider range of mystical experiences. As he writes: “‘Mystical experience’ and ‘mystical
perception,’ as we use those terms, do not imply absolute undifferentiated unity” (25). Yet even Alston
excludes embodied, sensory mystical experiences from his examination of religious perception: “I am
going to concentrate in this book on non-sensory mystical perception. It seems clear that a non-sensory
appearance of a purely spiritual deity has a greater chance of presenting Him as He is than any sensory
presentation” (20).
14 For a detailed discussion of the history of the term ‘mysticism’ that also includes helpful
references to further discussions, see Amy Hollywood’s introduction to The Cambridge Companion to
Christian Mysticism. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). For an overview of the complex
politics involved in the struggle to define mysticism in the twentieth century, see the first chapter of
Sarah Beckwith’s Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Medieval Writings. (London:
Routledge, 1993).
15 See Grace Jantzen’s Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995) and Monica Furlong’s Visions & Longings, Medieval Women Mystics
(Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2013) for book-length treatments of this topic. Gendered Voices:
Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, ed. Catherine Mooney (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1999), is a collection of essays on the ways in which gender factors into how
female mystics’ reported experiences were recorded, altered, and/or understood.
16 Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism, p. 4. For examples of the sort of approach Jantzen is
criticizing, see Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis, ed. S. Katz (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1978), which contains essays by Pike and Katz, in addition to a number of others (all men).
17 In Discerning Spirits, Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2003), Nancy Caciola discusses how women were seen as more likely to experience
divine visions, auditions, etc.—and more likely to be possessed by demons as well.
18 For detailed discussion of the sorts of experiences being reported, the general increase in
embodied mystical experiences in this time period, and their perceived relation to women and women’s
bodies, see ‘The Female Body and Religious Practice’ in Caroline Walker Bynum’s Fragmentation
and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone
Books, 1991), as well as Bernard McGinn’s The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the
New Mysticism—1200–1350. Vol. III of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian
Mysticism (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1998).
19 This was one of the reasons the testimony of women was not accepted in court. Perhaps it is also
one of the reasons why, in a recent volume on The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western
Christianity, ed. P. Gavrilyuk and S. Coakley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), none of
the fourteen historical figures who receive their own chapter are women.
20 Underhill, The Essentials of Mysticism, p. 20.
21 Underhill, The Essentials of Mysticism, p. 23.
22 David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1948–9), pp. 222–3.
23 Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1989),
p. 672.
24 See Beauvoir, The Second Sex, pp. 621ff.
 26 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mysticism/, section 9.
25 Jantzen, Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism, p. 3.
27 All quotes in this paragraph are from Marguerite Porete. The Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. E.
L. Babinsky (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1993), p. 218, translation slightly modified.
28 Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, eds. and
trans. E. Colledge and B. McGinn (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1981), p. 280.
29 Anon., The Cloud of Unknowing: with the Book of Privy Counselling, trans. Carmen
Acevedo Butcher (Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 2009), ch. 48, p. 110.
30 Walter Hilton: The Scale of Perfection, ed. Serenus Cressy (Monee, IL: Scotts Valley
California, 2010), Book One, ch. 10, p. 8. The Scale contains repeated admonitions against accepting
embodied experiences as signs of true mystical union.
31 Anon., The Cloud of Unknowing, ch. 45, p. 103.
32 Ibid.
33 Bernard McGinn, Introduction to Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries,
Treatises, and Defense, ed. Edmund Colledge, OSA, and Bernard McGinn (Mahwah: Paulist Press,
1981), p. 61. The sermon referenced is Sermon 16b in Meister Eckhart, Die deutschen und
lateinischen Werke. Herausgegeben im Auftrage der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft
(Stuttgart and Berlin: W. Kohlhammer, 1936–?), p. 272.
34 Niklaus Largier, “Inner Senses – Outer Senses: The Practice of Emotions in Medieval
Mysticism,” in Emotions and Sensibilities in the Middle Ages, ed. C. Jaeger and I. Kasten (Berlin
and New York: de Gruyter, 2003), pp. 3–15.
35 As Patricia Dailey notes in “The Body and Its Senses”: “The goal of affective mysticism is not to
excite the outer body into a Bacchic frenzy, but to allow one’s affective and thus embodied experience
to stimulate the construction of the inner body and then to allow the heart, innards, or inner senses to
speak and act through the outer body.” The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. A
Hollywood and P. Dailey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 269.
36 Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 91.
37 Caroline Walker Bynum has written extensively on the significance the Eucharist takes on in the
affective tradition; see, e.g., the chapters “The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages” and “Women
Mystics and Eucharistic Devotion in the Thirteenth Century” in Fragmentation and Redemption, as
well as Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
38 All quotes from Hadewijch in this and the following paragraph are from Vision Seven,
Hadewijch: The Complete Works, ed. and trans. Mother Columba Hart (Mahwah: Paulist Press,
1980), p. 281.
39 As Mary Suydam notes in “The Touch of Satisfaction: Visions and Religious Experience
according to Hadewijch of Antwerp”: “There is absolutely no indication, either here or anywhere else in
Hadewijch’s writings, that this embodied experience represents a ‘lower’ stage of religious experience.”
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 12 (Fall 1996), p. 16.
40 Hadewijch: The Complete Works, Letter 9, p. 66.
41 The Writings of Margaret of Oingt, Medieval Prioress and Mystic (d. 1310), trans. with an
introduction, essay, and notes by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990).
 42 See Nicholas Watson’s Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English
Mysticism, ed. S. Fanous and V. Gillespie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 1.
43 This isn’t simply conjecture on my part: I asked Amy Hollywood (the primary editor) why there
weren’t any philosophers among the authors of the essays, and this was the essence of her reply.
 2
Self-Knowledge

The importance of self-knowledge is a truth universally acknowledged in the

contemplative philosophical tradition: it is typically portrayed as a
precondition for both the best sort of human life and knowledge of the
divine.1 The self is the lens through which we view the world, after all, and
we cannot clearly see the truth about anything else—the world, our
neighbors, God—until we see ourselves clearly. The oracle at Delphi’s
injunction to ‘know thyself’ takes on particular importance in the Western
Christian tradition in the twelfth–fifteenth centuries: scholastic (that is,
university-based) discussions tend to focus on the mechanics involved in
knowing oneself and how those mechanics fit into broader metaphysic and
epistemic frameworks, inquiring about ‘what’ we are and how we can come
to know this, while contemplative and mystical discussions tend to focus on
‘who’ we are and to emphasize the significance of self-knowledge for the
ethical and religious life.
Contemporary treatments of medieval perspectives on self-knowledge
typically draw on scholastic sources, and thus skew toward the metaphysical
and epistemological.2 While contributing importantly to our understanding of
medieval views on such important topics as the problem of universals and
knowledge of singulars, however, this focus fails to address overarching
questions such as why we should seek to know ourselves in the first place,
and what the lasting effects of such knowledge might be; it also ignores
practical concerns about how we are supposed to acquire self-knowledge.
To find answers to these questions, we must look to contemplative texts—
and so it is to these texts that I turn now. As I explain in Section 2.1, most
medieval contemplatives understand self-knowledge as a necessary
condition for becoming virtuous and for achieving our final end as human
beings; the first step towards this is a basic awareness of the self as an agent
with various desires, fears, and dispositions. In Section 2.2 I lay out three of
the most common recommendations given for moving from a basic awareness
to the sort of self-knowledge necessary for true moral and spiritual progress:
look outside yourself to know yourself, ground yourself in humility, and use
reason and imagination to counter selfish pride. Section 2.3 describes the
ultimate ends towards which contemplatives advise applying this knowledge,
which range from knowing God via intellective union with God’s essence to
annihilating oneself in Love.

2.1 Putting the Self into Perspective

Although medieval contemplatives disagree with each other about the

relative roles reason and will should take in human life (see Chapters 3 and
4, respectively), what it is to be a person (see Chapter 5), and expectations
for immortality and the afterlife (see Chapter 6), virtually all medieval
contemplatives agree that introspection is essential to ethical and spiritual
growth. The Pursuit of Wisdom, for instance, dismisses the person who tries
to do theology without self-knowledge as wasting their time,3 while Julian of
Norwich writes: “We cannot come to a complete understanding of God
unless we come to truly know ourselves.”4 (This seems to presuppose both
that there is a coherent ‘self’ and that human beings have access to it—ideas
that today are highly controversial. In the Middle Ages, however, it was
taken for granted that there is an inner center of consciousness that connects
us to the external world and to the divine; the earlier Platonic, Stoic, Jewish,
Islamic, and Christian sources on which medieval discussions drew were
also united in this belief. Radical skepticism about the existence of this
center of consciousness and/or our ability to access it comes later.5) The
supposition that there is a conscious core at the center of our moral and
spiritual efforts does not, however, entail that accessing this center is an easy
matter. As virtually everyone has experienced, we are not transparent to
ourselves. Knowing oneself in the way needed for moral progress requires
hard and rigorous work: we tend to focus on incidental flaws and ignore the
ones that actually sabotage our lives; we relax into self-complacency just
when we should be pushing towards real change.
For this reason, the first step in a contemplative life is developing a basic
awareness of the self. As Hadewijch writes, “If you wish to experience
[spiritual] perfection, you must first of all learn to know yourselves: in all
your conduct, in your attraction or aversion, in your behavior, in love, in
hate, in fidelity, in mistrust, and in all things that befall you.”6 Meister
Eckhart counsels introspection as a way of acquiring “a clear apprehension
of our own inwardness”—a “lively, true, prudent and real knowledge”7 of
our tendencies and dispositions—while The Book of Privy Counselling
states starkly that if one wishes to make moral or spiritual progress, “I bid
thee first gnaw on the naked blind feeling of thine own being.”8 The image of
animals gnawing on naked human bodies was sometimes used in this period
to remind the viewer of their mortality and warn against the potentially
eternal effects of sin (see Figure 2.1); here, a similar image is used to
motivate us to lay bare the raw reality of our innermost selves.9

Figure 2.1 Lunette, anonymous, first half of the twelfth century, church of
San Giusto, Volterra.
 We tend to keep our guard up against this raw reality, however, distracting
ourselves with food, drink, sex, and mindless entertainment—and then later,
as Catherine of Siena observes, with the “delightful recollections” of those
things. Unfortunately, as Catherine also notes, this sort of self-avoidance
tends to result in the sort of selfish love for our own perceived good that in
turn leads to “hatred and contempt for [our] neighbors.”10 Not only do we
resent our neighbors when they have things we want but don’t have (material
goods, fame, attractiveness, etc.), but when we don’t see ourselves clearly,
we often become disproportionately frustrated or angry at others for
precisely the behaviors and habits that we (unknowingly) hate the most in
ourselves. We mistrust our neighbors’ motives because we can’t trust our
own; we misinterpret what they do because we don’t understand why we’re
doing what we do; we mask our fears and insecurities in an ungrounded and
precarious sense of superiority over those around us. Furthermore, as recent
literature on epistemic injustice and moral epistemology demonstrates, these
tendencies generate a variety of injustices on systemic and individual levels
—injustices that cause particular harm to individuals and groups we see as
“Other,” since our prejudices shape what (and who) we hear when people
speak, whose testimony we trust and on which subjects, etc.11
Training ourselves to confront the “naked blind feeling” of our own being
thus requires dedication and willpower, and it is no easy feat. Catherine, for
instance, describes our innate selfishness as a “cloud of disordered love”
that prevents us from knowing our true nature.12 Later, she writes that “selfish
love of oneself” (the hallmark of the vice of pride) is the ground of evil, and
that this love “blots out the light of reason.”13 We can’t develop morally or
spiritually if we live shadowed from reason (as we’ll see in more detail in
Chapter 3), but staying out from under this cloud requires vigilance. As
Hadewijch writes in a letter of advice to one of her sisters, we need to stay
strong in the task of honest self-investigation, for if our will falters, “We fall
back…into our own self-complacency; we no longer grow and no longer
make progress.”14
If the first step towards awareness of self is overcoming basic self-
avoidance, the second step is learning how to examine oneself in a way that
is both deep (penetrating beyond our superficial sense of self) and broad
(moving past examination of particular actions towards our general
underlying dispositions). Medieval contemplatives are often quite specific
about what sorts of activities are involved in this process. In The Mind’s
Journey into God, for instance, Bonaventure encourages us to turn inwards
and “re-enter ourselves—that is, our minds—in which the divine image
[imago] shines forth.”15 Meditating on the triune powers of understanding,
memory, and will within us, we begin to see God, albeit “through a mirror
darkly [in aenigmate].” Hadewijch recommends a more prosaic approach:
“Examine yourselves as to how you can endure everything disagreeable that
happens to you, and how you can bear the loss of what gives you pleasure…
And in everything pleasant that happens to you, examine yourselves as to
how you make use of it, and how wise and moderate you are with regard to
it.”16 That is, we need not just to remember how we have acted on (and
reacted to) situations in the past, and pay attention to what we currently
enjoy, dislike, fear, and desire—we also need to imagine good and bad
things happening to us in the future and observe what sorts of emotional
reactions we have to those prospects. We must also learn from our
experiences when how we think we will respond to a situation differs from
how we do respond: if our projected happiness at a friend’s success actually
turns out to include an unexpected amount of self-loathing at what we
perceive as our own failures, for instance, we need to pay attention and be
responsive to this fact. Furthermore, because our behaviors, feelings, and
attitudes fluctuate, this process of self-assessment needs to become a regular
discipline.
Meister Eckhart compares learning how to engage in this process to
learning how to write: at first it requires “attentiveness and a careful
formulation within the self, like schoolchildren preparing themselves to
learn.”17 At first, “we must indeed memorize each single letter and get it
firmly into our minds,” but repeated practice gradually internalizes the
process: “Then, when we have the art, we will not need to think about and
remember the letters’ appearance; we can write effortlessly and easily.” In
the same way, self-reflection eventually becomes second nature to us,
replacing our old habits of self-avoidance and complacency.
The prevailing assumption throughout these injunctions to examine
ourselves is that we won’t often be pleased with what we find; looking
straight on at what we try to avoid about ourselves is likely to be both painful
and humiliating (in the literal sense of ‘producing humility,’ as discussed in
Subsection 2.2.3). In her Flowing Light of the Godhead Mechthild of
Magdeburg memorably describes the process of preparing for this sort of
self-examination in terms of getting dressed and then looking in the mirror:
I put on the shoes of the precious time that I wasted day after day. I gird myself with the
suffering I have caused. Then I put on a cloak of the wickedness of which I am full. I put on my
head a crown of secret shameful acts that I have committed against God. After this, I take in my
hand the mirror of true knowledge. Then I look at myself and see who I really am.18

As we’ll see in Subsection 2.2.2, the metaphor of the mirror of self-

knowledge runs throughout the medieval contemplative tradition and is
typically associated with seeing ourselves the way that God sees us.
Although the sort of self-knowledge in which medieval contemplatives are
most interested is inherently humbling, then, it is important to note that
gaining an awareness of the ‘naked blind feeling’ of our own being is not
meant to be the beginning of a downward spiral of revulsion or self-loathing.
Rather, when we arrive at an accurate self-assessment and acknowledge
what that self looks like, we ‘hit bottom’—in a rather literal sense. We reach
the ‘ground’ of our being, “a receptive dimension, as bottomless and infinite
as God,” in which we can root ourselves and begin to grow.19 According to
medieval contemplatives, we can’t relate to the world from a place of love
until after we have stripped away our conceits and pretenses, for true love
flourishes only in the presence of truth.

2.2 Recommendations for Developing Self-Knowledge

Gaining an awareness of our innermost self is challenging, but it is also

necessary for moving from toxic selfishness to the knowledge of self that
yields radical compassion and clear-sighted love of both others and
ourselves. Because this sort of love is viewed as an essential component of
happiness in this period (see Chapter 4), acquiring this deeper sort of self-
knowledge is considered one of the most important things we human beings
can do. We thus find a wealth of practical advice for accomplishing this task
in contemplative texts, which are typically written both by and for people
committed to moral and spiritual development. In this section, I distill and
explain three of their most common recommendations for making the shift
from self-centered love to the caritas grounded in genuine self-knowledge:
1) look outside yourself to know yourself; 2) root yourself in humility
(which, as we’ll see, is also essential for recognizing our inherent dignity);
and 3) use reason and imagination to overcome selfish pride.

2.2.1 Look outside yourself to know yourself: the mirror of self-

knowledge

Contrary to the stereotype of desert hermit, most medieval mystics and

contemplatives lived embedded in spiritual and intellectual communities.20
Their experiences in these communities led them to recognize that, no matter
how good we might be at solitary introspection, there are things about
ourselves that we simply cannot know without rubbing elbows (emotional,
intellectual, spiritual, and/or physical) with others. I might think, for instance,
that I’ve achieved patience via meditation and readings until an hour in
traffic with a screaming toddler makes me realize how much farther I have to
go. Or I may hope that I’ve overcome my envy of a successful friend, but not
know for certain until I see her win a well-deserved award and find myself
genuinely rejoicing for her. As Catherine of Siena remarks, “Virtue cannot be
perfected or bear fruit except by means of your neighbors…And I say the
same of vice: Every one of them is committed by means of your neighbors.”21
The way people around us bring out both our worst and our best is also one
of the reasons communities dedicated to personal growth stress the
importance of accountability relations: not only does it take experiences with
others to help us realize where we are, morally and/or spiritually, but those
closest to us can frequently see aspects of ourselves more clearly than we
can. In short, we serve as mirrors for each other in ways vital for developing
and deepening self-knowledge.
The metaphor of the mirror becomes synonymous with self-knowledge in
art and literature in this period.22 Already in Section 2.1, we saw Mechthild
of Magdeburg look at herself in “the mirror of true knowledge” as a way of
building self-awareness.23 In Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies, Lady
Reason holds a mirror in lieu of a scepter, explaining: “No one can look into
this mirror, no matter what kind of creature, without achieving clear self-
knowledge.” Reason goes on to link self-knowledge both with knowledge
more broadly and with practical wisdom (also called prudence) in
particular: “Thanks to this mirror, the essences, qualities, proportions, and
measures of all things are known, nor can anything be done well without
it.”24 Representations of practical wisdom/prudence in this period often
portray the virtue as a woman holding a mirror which symbolizes the self-
knowledge necessary for making wise judgments.25 (See Figure 2.2.) Self-
knowledge’s particular link with prudence also underscores the importance
of introspection in the virtuous life, for practical wisdom straddles the line
between intellective and moral virtues and was seen as crucial for the
development and regulation of the moral virtues.26

Figure 2.2 Prudence, Piero del Pollaiolo, 1470, Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

The Middle Ages in fact sees the development of an entire genre of

literature called ‘mirrors,’ texts which present a model of a virtue, social
role, or set of desired qualities, serving as a sort of instruction manual meant
to help the reader by reflecting to them an ideal version of what they’re
aspiring to. Although mirrors are also written for any number of secular roles
(Machiavelli’s sixteenth century The Prince, although hardly a standard
example of the genre, followed on a number of earlier medieval and
renaissance mirrors for princes), mirrors become particularly prominent in
the contemplative tradition from the mid-twelfth through fifteenth centuries.
William of Saint Thierry and Aelred of Rievaulx write mirrors of faith and
charity, respectively, more than a century before Marguerite Porete’s Mirror
of Simple Souls becomes the talk of Paris in the early 1300s. Such mirrors
were meant to spark greater self-awareness while simultaneously
encouraging moral and spiritual improvement: they functioned like a
particularly wise and honest advisor or mentor.
People were also described as mirrors in this sense: in the 1253 papal
bull canonizing Clare of Assisi, for instance, Pope Alexander IV describes
her as a “a clear mirror given to the entire world.”27 Clare’s own testament
uses the same language to acknowledge the importance of moral and spiritual
models, stating that “the Lord Himself set us as an example and mirror for
others”; she warmly encourages the newer sisters in her order, saying that
they will, in turn, “be a mirror and example to those living in the world.”28
The ultimate mirror in this sense, though, is of course Christ—the only human
being to live a perfect, sinless life.29 Clare of Assisi thus also encourages her
protégée, Agnes, to place herself before “before the mirror of eternity,”
embracing the “blessed poverty, holy humility, and ineffable charity,” which
we find there in Christ.30 Clare goes on to tell Agnes to “Look upon that
mirror each day, O queen and spouse of Jesus Christ, and continually study
your face within it, so that you may adorn yourself within and without with
beautiful robes and cover yourself with the flowers and garments of all the
virtues.” The noble-born Clare is here drawing on a trope familiar from the
courtly love poems of her day (the lady dressing in finery and looking at
herself in a mirror, which we also saw Mechthild of Magdeburg employ; see
also Interlude 4) to illustrate the process of self-examination and
improvement.
The metaphor of the mirror of Christ also provides a vital point of
connection between knowledge of self and knowledge of God. As the
fourteenth-century Pursuit of Wisdom notes, “When [a mirror] is clean,
everything can be seen [in it] clearly. But when the mirror is dirty, you can
see nothing clearly in it. It is just the same with your soul; when it is dirty,
you know neither yourself nor God.”31 Catherine of Siena makes the same
connection in her Dialogue, stating that, “As the soul comes to know herself,
she also knows God better, for she sees how good God has been to her. In the
gentle mirror of God, she sees her own dignity: that through no merit of hers
but by his creation, she is the image of God.”32 (See Figure 2.3, in which a
noble lady holds a mirror that reflects not her own face but the face of the
unicorn next to her; unicorns symbolize purity in this period, but they also
symbolize Christ.33) Julian of Norwich also links knowledge of self with
knowledge of God quite definitively in the long text of her Showings or
Revelations of Divine Love: “Whether we are moved to seek God or our
own souls, we are led through grace to know them both as one.”34

Figure 2.3 Detail of ‘Sight’ panel of the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries,
Flemish workshop, c.1500, Musée de Cluny, Paris.

The ongoing process of self-examination and introspection that yields this

deeper sort of knowledge of self is one that connects us to, rather than
separates us from, those around us. As the early fourteenth-century Flemish
Jan van Ruusbroec writes, “We must go out to God and to ourselves and to
our neighbor, and this must be done with charity and righteousness.” If we
approach everyone (including ourselves) in this way, “charity and
righteousness [will] lay a foundation in the kingdom of the soul in which God
is to dwell; this foundation is humility.”35 As I discuss in Subsection 2.2.2,
humility is both a natural consequence of self-knowledge and a necessary
ground for moral and spiritual growth.

2.2.2 Root down in humility to rise up in dignity: the tree of self

Understood as a spiritual discipline, self-knowledge has an inherently

humbling effect. Indeed, according to this tradition, one of the main effects of
self-knowledge is humility, a virtue central to both the moral and religious
life. Medieval expressions of such humility often sound to our modern ears
more like self-loathing—we instinctively recoil when Clare of Assisi refers
to herself as an “unworthy servant” and “useless handmaid” of Christ, for
instance, or when Mechthild of Magdeburg describes herself as a “filthy
puddle”36—but it would be a mistake to reduce this to the familiar historical
narrative that medieval religious movements encouraged self-hatred and that
it took the ‘Enlightenment’ for human beings to regain a sense of dignity and
self-worth. Rather, it is important to understand the contemplative emphasis
on humility in its larger context, where rooting ourselves in the humble
ground of our own being is a necessary condition for growing into our full
potential as human beings and God-imagers. Gazing at ourselves in the
eternal mirror of God is both humbling and uplifting: we see any number of
ways in which we (both individually and as members of the human species)
fall short of what we should be, but at the same time we see our own inherent
dignity as image bearers of the divine. As Lady Conscience observes to Lady
Knowledge in Mechthild of Magdeburg’s Flowing Light of the Godhead,
“When I examine myself in [my fine mirror], I experience both pleasure and
pain. Pleasure, because God comes to me as a flowing goodness; pain,
because I am so feeble in good works.”37
Feelings of unworthiness are consistently portrayed in this period as
appropriate attitudes to adopt when comparing ourselves with God. This
exercise is meant to reduce our inclination towards inflated self-worth, but
the ultimate end of the rigorous work of introspection is experiencing God’s
love in the most perfect way. Introspection highlights our fragility and leads
us to recognize our dependency, but that dependency is on a God who loves
us: we can’t fully appreciate that love in the absence of accurate self-
appraisal. It would be equally inappropriate in this context to loathe
ourselves insofar as we are beings capable of spiritual growth and union
with the Divine or as beloved by God. Self-knowledge may inevitably lead
to humility, but humility is, in Hadewijch’s words, “the worthiest and purest
place in which we receive love.”38
The idea that self-knowledge puts the subject in a better position to love
and be loved runs throughout the medieval contemplative tradition. Catherine
of Siena, for instance, depicts the relation between self-knowledge, love, and
knowledge of God as a sort of upwards spiral. She opens the Dialogue with
an autobiographical account of this interplay:
A soul rises up, restless with tremendous desire for God’s honor and the salvation of souls. She
has for some time exercised herself in virtue and has become accustomed to dwelling in the cell
of self-knowledge in order to know better God’s goodness toward her, since upon knowledge
follows love. And loving, she seeks to pursue truth and clothe herself in it.39

On this view, greater self-knowledge means greater knowledge of God—and,

in so doing, it kindles greater love for God in light of God’s goodness, which
in turn creates a greater desire to know more about God. In this way, humility
is explicitly conceived as the starting point in a dynamic journey towards
union with God.
Experience of this unitive state in earthly life is then described as a
foretaste of the everlasting union that the blessed experience in the afterlife.
As Angela of Foligno says, “In that state [mystic union] I see myself as alone
with God, totally cleansed, totally sanctified, totally true, totally upright,
totally certain, totally celestial in him.”40 It is the humility generated by true
self-knowledge that, paradoxically, also generates the confidence that we are
capable of being united with God’s perfection, whatever our current state.
To illustrate the complex relation between self-knowledge, humility, and
dignity, medieval contemplatives frequently draw on the ancient metaphor of
the tree of self.41 In Hadewijch’s first vision, for instance, an angel shows
her a series of trees, the first of which the angel calls the “tree of self-
knowledge,” and which has a rotten root, symbolic of fallen human nature.42
The decay of the root indicates human nature can’t flourish on its own—a
fact that we learn about ourselves via knowledge of self. Marguerite d’Oingt,
in turn, relates a vision in which she is a dry tree with withered leaves, who
is miraculously revived by “great stream descending with a force like that of
the sea,” which represents God’s love and mercy.43 Similarly, Gertrude the
Great describes herself in The Herald of Divine Love as a “frail little plant”
that withers “hour to hour through her faults and negligences” until she is
watered with the water and blood that flow from Christ’s wound, at which
point the little plant grows into a green tree which is literally rooted in
Christ’s side.44 Mechthild of Hackeborn, meanwhile, relates a vision in
which she sees the Virgin Mary in the form of “beautiful tree, higher and
broader than the whole earth. This tree was just as transparent as a luminous
mirror, and its golden leaves made the loveliest sound. In its crown was a
delicious flower [Christ] that shaded the whole world and spread abroad an
extraordinary fragrance.”45 Mary serves here as a model—a literal mirror—
for how humble roots (humility being one of the traits most associated with
her) can support extraordinary moral and spiritual growth.46
In general, the deeper our roots of humble self-knowledge delve, the
higher we can reach towards God.47 As Johannes Tauler (a fourteenth-
century disciple of Meister Eckhart) explains: “In order to gain the crown of
perfection, there is nothing more important than to sink down into the deepest
ground and into the root of humility. Just as a tree’s height comes out of its
deepest root, so too everything that is high in this life comes from the ground
of humility.”48 Catherine of Siena in turn offers a lengthy tree-related
metaphor of the relation between self-knowledge, humility, and God. She
invites us to “imagine a circle traced on the ground” with a tree in the center
of the circle.49 The tree represents the human soul, “made for love and living
only by love,” and planted in the soil of humility. In fact, the circle on the
ground (which represents the interwoven knowledge of the self and of God)
extends only as far as humility does.50
By the time Julian of Norwich completes the long text of her Showings at
the turn of the fifteenth century, the metaphor of the tree of self (watered by
God) is so familiar that she can reference it without explicit mention. In
explaining the relation between human beings and God, for instance, she
simply writes: “Mercy and grace spring from God’s essential nature and
flow into us, penetrating our souls and accomplishing everything needed for
the fulfillment of our greatest joy. This is the soil in which our being, our
growth, and our fulfillment are planted.”51 For Julian, knowledge of both self
and God develops in organic relationship; neither can occur in separation
from the other. “Our soul is so deeply rooted in God,” she observes, “that we
cannot come to know it until we have first come to know God, who is the
Creator and to whom our soul is one-ed…[Yet] we cannot come to a
complete understanding of God unless we come to truly know ourselves.”52
These understandings are so intimately connected that she concludes:
“Whether we are moved to seek God or our own souls, we are led through
grace to know them both as one.”53
The ultimate end of self-knowledge, then, is the knowledge and love that
unites us with God. As The Pursuit of Wisdom notes, if we “exercise
ourselves diligently and for a long while in those spiritual works by means of
which we are taught to know ourselves,” we can be “lifted up to the
knowledge and contemplation of God.”54 Self-knowledge enables us to reach
from earth to heaven; self-knowledge allows us to spread from love of
ourselves to love of neighbors to love of God.55 The intimate experience of
divine union is a far cry from self-abasement, and yet it is made possible by
the humility that results from self-knowledge.56

2.2.3 Use reason and imagination to overcome selfish pride

Developing the humility in which self-knowledge can flourish requires

rooting out pride—the ‘deadliest’ of the deadly vices. Because pride is
typically portrayed as disordered love (love of self above love of God and
others), medieval contemplatives often recommend using reason and
imagination to identify love’s proper object (the good, which every being
possesses but which God—the Highest Good—possesses to the greatest
extent) and to guide love’s attention back towards that object when it strays.
The disciplines of coming to terms with the ‘naked blind feeling of our own
being’ and seeing ourselves as reflected in and by others can make us aware
of the desires and dispositions that are interfering with the growth and
maturation of our selves, but it takes the careful application of reason and
will for us to change. Catherine of Siena puts this in characteristically vivid
terms when she writes that self-knowledge allows us to “find humility and
hatred for [our] selfish sensory passions,” at which point we then must
“crush those desires firmly under the foot of reason.”57 It’s an important step
when we realize that our jealousy of a friend’s amazing success stems from
our deep-seated worry that we’ll never measure up, but figuring out how to
become someone whose sense of self isn’t based on how others are doing—
and then actually putting that into practice—is a much larger project. The
goal is to eliminate the harmful inclinations that introspection has uncovered
so that better desires and affections can flourish, and to amplify reason’s
efforts in guiding the development of these better desires, medieval
contemplatives tend to advocate the careful application of imagination.
Imagination was seen in this period as reason’s servant, or handmaiden.58
One of its main functions is to store the sensory impressions (also called
phantasms) that we draw on when we’re thinking. When we’re trying first to
form and then later to refine an abstract concept like ‘dog,’ for instance, we
need to be able to call to mind—in medieval terms, imagine—various
experiences we’ve had with four-legged furry creatures with tails in order to
separate the ones who meow or squeak from the ones who bark, and to
connect the tiny yappy barking creatures with the large woofy barking
creatures. In fact, a standard medieval line about human knowledge is that
“without imagination, reason can have no knowledge,” for phantasms are the
building blocks of cognition.59
According to this tradition, imagination also allows us to take various
sense impressions we’ve had in the past and combine them in new ways, as
when a coach encourages you to picture yourself winning a race before you
run it. Using imagination in this way gives us further insight into ourselves:
when we picture ourselves winning, for instance, how do we feel? How do
the people around us act, and how do we behave towards our fellow
runners? Imagination thus plays an important role in moral self-improvement:
if we notice that we regularly continue arguments in our heads long after an
actual conversation has ended, for example, and get increasingly angry with
people who aren’t even there, the careful use of reason and imagination can
help us refocus our mental energy towards generating more constructive
responses to the situation and imagining how we might put those strategies
into practice.
Medieval contemplatives also stress the importance of the joint work of
reason and imagination for making spiritual progress. One of the most widely
read devotional books of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the
anonymous Meditations on the Life of Christ, is specifically devoted to
helping its audience engage imagination via reason, to deepen and develop
participation in the contemplative life.60 As it notes, “There are two things in
us we must cleanse, namely our intellect and our feeling: our intellect that it
may know; our feeling that it may will.”61 In order to do this, the Meditations
alternates excerpts from sermons by Bernard of Clairvaux with a series of
homely vignettes from the life of Christ meant to serve as ‘mirrors’—and in
which the audience is invited to place themselves. The whole medieval genre
of meditations generally encourages its readers to imagine and then engage
with the events in Christ’s life, most particularly Christ’s Passion and death.
(For more on these meditations and their intended effects, see Section 4.3.)
Representations of such events also become much more personal and
engaging in this period. Thus, for instance, depictions of the Passion tend to
shift from displaying Christ as nobly dispassionate in the eleventh and
twelfth centuries (see Figure 2.4, in which both Christ and the onlookers
seem relatively unaffected by his crucifixion) to more expressive scenes in
the thirteenth century and onward in which Christ and his viewers openly
suffer (see Figure 2.5, in which the Marys grieve over Christ’s dead body—
and in which nuns from the convent for whom the painting was created are
portrayed mourning on the far right.)
Figure 2.4 Esaltazione della Croce, Maestro di Tressa, 1215, Pinacoteca
Nazionale di Siena.
Figure 2.5 Lamentation over the Dead Christ, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, 1342–
4, Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena.

The exercise of meditation was viewed as an important method of

countering selfish pride and further grounding the self-knowledge in which
love (caritas) flourishes. As the prologue to the Meditations explains,
“From frequent meditation our hearts are set on fire and animated to imitate
and lay hold of these virtues [i.e., the virtues Christ’s life displays]. Then we
are illuminated by divine virtue in such a way that we both clothe ourselves
with virtue and distinguish what is false from what is true.”62 In other words,
developing virtues via this imaginative engagement also makes us wiser. If
we meditate regularly, we generate affection and love “enough for us to
warm our whole self in it” as we move into higher realms of intellective
contemplation.63
We see this interplay between imagination, virtue, and reason in a variety
of contemplative texts. Catherine of Siena, for example, notes in her
Dialogue that “There are, then, two aspects to yourself: sensuality and
reason. Sensuality is a servant, and it has been appointed to serve the soul, so
that your body may be your instrument for proving and exercising virtue.”64
The word translated here as ‘sensuality’ (sensualitas) doesn’t correspond
neatly to the contemporary English word ‘sensuality’: it’s a broad term that
includes all of our sensory capacities (sight, hearing, taste, etc.), imagination,
and our sense appetites (inclinations towards things perceived as pleasant
and away from things perceived as unpleasant, plus fear and anger towards
things perceived as dangerous). (For more on medieval conceptions of
sensualitas, see Chapter 4.1.1.) Reason is the means by which we put these
things to good use and gain virtue, knowledge, and wisdom. As I discuss in
more detail in Chapter 3, our faculty of reason is integrally tied up with our
physicality. It is thus vital for us to use this faculty well, so that our bodies
help rather than hinder us in our moral and spiritual pursuits. Our wills are
also guided by reason in important ways. For instance, as Hadewijch notes,
our desire to do good things falters when we don’t use reason well: “When
reason is obscured, the will grows weak and powerless and feels an
aversion to effort, because reason does not enlighten it.”65
On the other hand, if we use reason and imagination to guide our
affections and develop virtue, we can combat the prideful love of self that
wants everything for its own. To be truly effective in its guidance, though, our
reason needs to be ‘enlightened’—a concept that harks back to Plato and
Plotinus and that is brought into in the Latin Christian tradition by Augustine
and other advocates of illuminationist theories.66 For many contemplatives
(especially those in the Augustinian tradition, such as the Victorines and
Hadewijch) reason that has been illuminated by God is perhaps our most
important ally in deepening and developing the self-knowledge that
undergirds moral and spiritual progress. Richard of St. Victor even goes so
far as to claim that “through the illumination of our reason by the grace of
God we come to perfect knowledge of ourselves and of God,” before quickly
adding “at least as far as is possible in this life.”67
So much, then, for what it is possible with respect to knowledge of
ourselves and knowledge of God in this life. But what about the next?

2.3 Self-Knowledge, Mystic Union, and Our Final End

Although virtually all mystics and contemplatives in the thirteenth–fifteenth

centuries portray self-knowledge as a necessary step towards our final end,
they present a wide range of differing views about what our final end is and
how self-knowledge factors into it. Some maintain that our ultimate goal is
merging with God in selfless union, and that self-knowledge’s most important
role is helping us release attachment to the self. Others hold that everlasting
union with God will perfectly restore and fulfill the embodied self; self-
knowledge remains important on this view insofar as it helps us recognize
and appreciate this connection to God. (For more about contemplative
expectations regarding immortality and the afterlife, see Chapter 6; in the
remainder of this chapter, my aim is merely to map out the role self-
knowledge is given in attaining those differing ends.)

2.3.1 Our final end as self-annihilation

As we saw in Chapter 1, some medieval contemplatives hold that the final

end of human beings involves extinguishing awareness of individuality to
merge with an unknowable God. This view is typically associated with
‘apophatic’ contemplativism; apophasis, which means ‘denial’ or ‘negation’
in Greek, is the view that language and thought are incapable of capturing or
revealing positive truths about the Divine.68 Union with a God who
transcends not just matter but also thought—and possibly being itself—
cannot be attained as long as we hold onto any of those things ourselves.
On this framework, self-knowledge’s ultimate function is identifying and
rooting out any lingering self-orientation. As Meister Eckhart observes,
“There was never anyone in this life who forsook himself so much that he
could not still find more in himself to forsake. But as much as you go out in
forsaking all things, by so much, neither less nor more, does God go in.”69 On
this view, God cannot enter into us fully until we empty ourselves fully.
Knowledge of ourselves is essential for this process—but even this
knowledge must eventually be transcended; the more we detach from the self
that introspection reveals, the more we can lose ourselves in the hidden
darkness of God. In The Mirror of Simple Souls, Marguerite Porete
describes this as a state in which “The whole is one to her without an
explanation [sine propter quid], and she is nothing in such a one…God is
and she is not.”70 Meister Eckhart echoes this idea, writing that “[After
detachment] there is still one work that remains proper and his own, and that
is annihilation of self.”71 This process of self-annihilation involves both
intellect and will: to the extent that the intellect clings to its knowledge, it
remains apart from God’s truth; to the extent to which the will continues to
want things for itself, it holds itself apart from God’s will.
The paradox of using self-knowledge to annihilate the self is not lost on
apophatic contemplatives. Nevertheless, they claim that there is no other way
to reach our final end. Johannes Tauler, Eckhart’s friend and follower,
entreats us to “turn in to yourself with self-knowledge”72 so that we may
reach the state in which “everything brought there [namely, to the ground of
the soul]—its humility, its intention, its very self—loses its name, and there
is only a bare, silent, mysterious unity without any distinction.”73 In this state,
Tauler says, a person “neither knows, nor feels, nor experiences himself.”74
Although it is unclear from the texts whether such union ultimately involves a
loss of being, the phenomenological experience of such union is certainly one
in which any sense of self is lost.
This emphasis on self-abnegation also appears in the Cloud of
Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counselling, anonymous fourteenth-
century English works. Even the ‘naked blind feeling’ of our own being that
we were instructed to gnaw on at the outset of the development of self-
knowledge must be relinquished in order for us to attain our final end. “Your
awareness of everything else is contingent on your awareness of yourself,”
counsels the Cloud. “When you succeed in forgetting all creatures and their
works and even your own life and all you’ve done, you will be left alone
with God to experience a stark awareness of your own existence. But even
this must go. Yes, you must lose the naked feeling of who you are. It must be
destroyed, if you wish to experience the perfection of contemplation, or
love.”75

2.3.2 Our final end as self-fulfillment

Although (as I discuss in Chapter 1) the conception of self-annihilating union

as the final end of human beings is dominant in philosophical discussions of
mysticism today, in the Middle Ages this view was the exception rather than
the rule. The majority of medieval contemplatives saw self-knowledge not
just as a step towards union with God but as a lasting feature of such union.
Sometimes referred to in contemporary discussions as ‘affective’ mysticism,
this tradition emphasizes Christ’s humanity, viewing the human body and
material world as in need of restoration, not annihilation.76 The Incarnation
—literally, the ‘enfleshment’—of God takes on central importance for many
contemplatives in this period because it gives human beings a tangible
connection to the divine. On this view, self-knowledge is essential for
engaging in the work of restoration via love (caritas), which Christ literally
embodies in his life on earth, Passion, and resurrection. In the thirteenth–
fifteenth centuries, contemplatives use Christ’s model to reconceptualize the
relationship between human beings and God in a fresh, “bodily and
emotionally laden way.”77
Knowing ourselves as bodily subjects thus becomes a way of knowing
Christ, who is simultaneously fully human and fully divine. Julian of
Norwich, for instance, portrays the Incarnation as the key to restoration of
creation as a whole, and fallen human beings in particular. Human nature
possesses what she calls ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ parts: the higher part is the
spiritual, intellective part which we have in common with immaterial beings
such as God and the angels (see Chapter 4), and the lower part is the sensory
part, which we have in common with other animals. Both parts are inherently
good, but both have been corrupted by sin and thus need to be redeemed. The
act of Christ taking on human nature is what allows both parts of our nature to
be restored. As she writes:
Because of the glorious unity God forged between the soul and the body, humanity will inevitably
be raised from the double death (physical and spiritual). This restoration would not be possible if
it had not been for the Second Person of the Holy Trinity who took on the lower part of human
nature, which has always been united to the higher part.78 Both the higher and the lower aspects
of human nature, enfolded in Christ, are elements of a single soul.79

For contemplatives in this tradition, sensory experiences are essential for the
formation and development of the self; they serve as “vehicles for religious
knowledge: knowledge of God, and of the human person in relation to
God.”80
The belief that human beings are most closely joined with Christ’s
divinity through his corporeity also makes the ritual of partaking in that body
in the Eucharist especially prone to sensory mystical experiences.81 As
Caroline Walker Bynum notes, in this period “the fundamental religious goal
was seen to be union with the physical body Christ took on in the Incarnation
and daily in the mass”82—a union often experienced mystically as a
fulfillment of the embodied self. The vision of Marguerite d’Oingt mentioned
in Subsection 2.2.3 beautifully characterizes the idea of physical and sensory
restoration of the self, and so I quote it here in full:
It seemed to her that she was in a large deserted open space where there was only one high
mountain, and at the foot of this mountain there stood a marvelous tree. This tree had five
branches which were all dry and were bending down. On the leaves of the first branch there
was written “sight”; on the second was written “hearing”; on the third was written “taste”; on
the fourth was written “smell”; on the fifth was written “touch”…And after she had looked
attentively at the tree, she raised her eyes towards the mountain, and she saw a great stream
descending with a force like that of the sea. This stream rushed so violently down onto the
bottom of this tree that all its roots were turned upside down and the top was stuck in the earth;
and the branches which had been bent downwards were now stretching towards heaven. And
the leaves which had been dry were all green, and the roots which had been in the earth were all
spread out and pointing towards the sky; and they were all green and full of leaves as branches
usually are.83

Such a depiction of the flourishing self, turned upside down and now rooted
in Christ, is in sharp contrast to Marguerite Porete’s vision of complete self-
abnegation: a state in which she is ‘nothing.’

2.4 Conclusion

There was general agreement among medieval mystics and contemplatives in

the Rome-based Christian tradition that unflinching introspection is the first
step towards moral and spiritual progress. We need self-knowledge in order
to move from unthinking, prideful love of self to a reflective and clear-
sighted love of self—a love that can support radical compassion and self-
sacrifice, and that can also ground love for God and our neighbors. This
second sort of love (caritas) is our ultimate goal, but we cannot simply will
it into being. Thus, after we take unflinching stock of our ‘inner being,’
contemplatives recommend looking outside ourselves for models of this
love; coming to know ourselves in a morally and spiritually useful way thus
becomes a sort of community project. Grounding this sense of self in humility
is also consistently portrayed as essential for perceiving our inherent dignity,
and we are instructed to put reason and imagination to creative use in
combating selfish pride. Medieval contemplatives differ widely in their
understanding of the final goal of human life, however, and so they differ in
their understanding of the role self-knowledge should play in attaining this
goal. Self-knowledge is vital for us to open ourselves to God, but such
knowledge of self can be used both to root out traces of oneself for self-
abnegating union with the divine and to restore the self in relation to the God
who became human without ceasing to be divine.

Interlude Two

What Is a Beguine?
Inspired by the life of Christ’s apostles (the ‘vita apostolica’), a host of lay
religious movements flourished in Western Europe in the thirteenth through
fifteenth centuries—and chief among these were the beguines.84 Part of the
pre-Reformational shift towards lay personal piety and away from religious
lives mediated via increasingly complex (and corrupt) levels of
ecclesiastical hierarchies,85 beguines were lay religious women who
devoted their lives to prayer, teaching, penance, contemplation, and service.
Usually living in communities of like-minded women (but sometimes alone,
often in a room of their family’s house), beguines taught school, ministered to
the poor, and nursed the sick; unsupported by the Church, beguines
maintained financial independence by sharing inheritances and selling their
embroidery, lacework, and other products.86
Although the exact rise of the movement remains shrouded in mystery, it’s
easy to see why the life would have constituted an attractive option for
medieval women.87 Becoming a beguine meant avoiding the perils of
childbirth and arranged marriages; at the same time, the beguine lifestyle
offered more autonomy than that of a nun. While most convents at the time
cloistered women, for instance, and all required lifelong celibacy, beguine
communities were open to women who wanted to dedicate themselves to
religious devotion but who were either not willing or not able to ‘take the
veil’: unlike nuns, beguines remained actively involved in their broader
communities, could leave at any time to get married (or for any other reason),
and accepted anyone who was willing to live by their rules. Many convents
also required dowry payments for entrance, particularly as space in existing
communities became scarce, while—unrestricted by the tight rules governing
the foundation of a convent, which had to be affiliated with and supported by
a particular religious order—the number of beguinages simply increased to
meet demand. And the demand in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was
high, particularly in France, Germany, and the Low Countries (modern-day
Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands). By 1300 there were at least two
hundred beguinages in Strasbourg, where Eckhart and Tauler were preaching,
and in Cologne “as many as fifteen hundred women lived in more than 150
beguine houses.”88
The physical space of a beguinage was typically designed to reflect the
needs of a group of single women living in community: a number of
dwellings and other buildings were arranged around a central courtyard,
surrounded by a high wall with an entrance that could be closed and/or
guarded. In some ways, beguinages were similar to modern co-ops or condo
associations: the women shared responsibility for and access to common
courtyards and communal gardens, and collectively owned the property in
which they all lived. The fact that their houses and land were owned not by
the Church but by individual beguines meant that the those with enough
resources to purchase property would often rent out rooms or houses at low
rates to those with fewer resources; if a land-owning beguine left the
beguinage for any reason, she would sell her house to someone else in the
community. Although modified to meet changing needs, the basic
configuration of beguinages remains the same over the centuries, with the
main entrance that could be closed off (see Figure I2.1) and houses arranged
around a central courtyard (see Figure I2.2.).
Figure I2.1 Entrance into the beguinage of Antwerp, seen from inside.
Figure I2.2 Beguinage of Amsterdam, central courtyard, seen from church.

Larger beguinages often had their own chapels, their own libraries, and
sometimes even their own scriptoriums (as did some convents); not
surprisingly, such beguinages were the source of a great deal of
contemplative and mystical literature.89 The Great Beguinage of Ghent, for
instance, “constituted a city within the city, with its walls and moats, two
churches, eighteen convents, and hundred houses, its brewery and
infirmary.”90 Beguinages were also frequently located near Dominican
houses, for that Order’s focus on preaching and teaching meant that many
Dominican friars served as confessors, spiritual advisors, celebrants, and
preachers for beguines. (Many of Meister Eckhart’s and Johannes Tauler’s
German sermons survive, for instance, because the communities of women to
which they were preached wrote them down to study and to share.)
The Rome-based ecclesiastical hierarchy soon became uncomfortable
with (and suspicious of) a massive movement of unmarried lay women who,
although dedicated to a religious life, were not subject to the Rule of any
particular Order. Already in 1311, the Council of Vienne aims one bull
(“Cum de quibusdam mulieribus,” Clem. 3.11.1) specifically at beguines.
The papal document criticizes ‘certain women’ for “discussing the Holy
Trinity and for offering opinions to others regarding the sacraments.”91 (Note
that this implies that there were enough women involved in debates about
philosophical theology for the highest levels of the Church to worry about
what they were saying.) Although the document officially forbids the
founding of more beguinages, it allows women already living an “upright
life” in such communities to remain, and the beguine movement continues to
flourish throughout the Low Countries and France throughout the fourteenth
century and well into the fifteenth. (It also enjoys a substantial revival in the
seventeenth century.) The movement has left a permanent mark on cities
throughout northern Europe, many of which still have beguinages that now
serve other functions (some preserved as museums or tourist sites, some
converted into housing for the elderly or low-income families, etc.) and/or
streets named for the beguinages that used to be there (such as the Rue des
Beguines in Chartres and the Wijde Begijnestraat in Utrecht).

1 For a history of the philosophical concept of self-knowledge, see Self-Knowledge, ed. U. Renz,
Oxford Philosophical Concepts Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
2 For an excellent discussion of scholastic views on self-knowledge, see Therese Scarpelli Cory’s
Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Dominik
Perler’s “Self-Knowledge in Scholasticism,” in Self-Knowledge, ed. Renz, pp. 114–30.
3 The Pursuit of Wisdom and Other Works by the Author of the Cloud of Unknowing, ed. and
trans. James Walsh (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1988), p. 34. The Pursuit of Wisdom is an anonymous
fourteenth-century Middle English translation and adaptation of Richard of St. Victor’s twelfth-century
The Twelve Patriarchs (also known as the Benjamin Minor).
4 The Showings of Julian of Norwich: A new translation, trans. Mirabai Starr (Charlottesville,
VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Co., 2013), p. 155.
5 For more on this development, see Bob Pasnau’s Metaphysical Themes 1274–1671 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011) and After Certainty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
6 Letter 14, Hadewijch: The Complete Works, ed. and trans. Mother Columba Hart, OSB
(Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1980), 77.
7 Counsel Six in Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and
Defense, ed. E. Colledge, OSA, and B. McGinn (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1981), p. 253. Here and
throughout I have modified the translation to the plural both for stylistic consistency and to provide
gender neutrality.
8 English Mystics of the Middle Ages, ed. Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), p. 94.
9 C. S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader contains a striking metaphor for this process in
Eustace’s report of Aslan’s peeling away Eustace-the-transformed-dragon’s skin to get to Eustace-the-
boy: “The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when
he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me
able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off…And there was I as smooth and soft as
a peeled switch and smaller than I had been.” (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 115–16.
10 Catherine of Siena: The Dialogue, trans. Suzanne Noffke, OP (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1980),
ch. 4, p. 32.
11 In addition to the sources on epistemic justice mentioned in footnote 11 of the Preface (namely,
Fricker 2007 and Medina 2013), see also Emmalon Davis’s “Typecasts, Tokens, and Spokespersons: A
Case for Credibility Excess as Testimonial Injustice” in Hypatia 31/3 (2016), pp. 485–501; Jennifer
Lackey’s “False Confessions and Testimonial Injustice” in The Journal of Criminal Law and
Criminology 110/1 (2020), pp. 43–68; and Robin Zheng’s “What is My Role in Changing the System?
A New Model of Responsibility for Structural Injustice,” in Ethical Theory & Moral Practice 21
(2018), pp. 869–85.
12 Catherine, Dialogue, ch. 44, p. 90. “But they, blinded as they are by the cloud of disordered love,
know neither me [God] nor themselves.”
13 Catherine, Dialogue, ch. 50, p. 102.
14 Hadewijch, The Complete Works, Letter 30, p. 117.
15 Translation mine; the Quaracchi edition of the Opera Omnia S Bonaventura, Vol V, 1891,
http://faculty.uml.edu/rinnis/45.304%20God%20and%20Philosophy/ITINERARIUM.pdf (accessed July
18, 2019).
16 Hadewijch, The Complete Works, Letter 14, p. 77.
17 Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense. ed. and
trans. Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1981), p. 254.
18 Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. Frank Tobin (Mahwah:
Paulist Press, 1998), Book VI, pp. 226–7.
19 “The Concept of Ground” in Ineke Cornet’s The Arnhem Mystical Sermons: Preaching
Liturgical Mysticism in the Context of Catholic Reform (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 271. The concept of the
‘ground of being’ is an important one in the contemplative tradition, with roots running back to its earliest
texts. In the thirteenth-fifteenth centuries, it appears in a number of contemplative texts (including
Hadewijch and Jan van Ruusbroec), growing in significance and becoming a central concept in Meister
Eckhart and his followers (particularly Johannes Tauler).
20 By the thirteenth century, the Franciscan, Dominican, and Augustinian orders had joined the
earlier Carthusian, Cistercian, and Benedictine orders in establishing monasteries, convents, abbeys,
priories, etc., which housed men and women who took lifelong vows and lived in community. By the
fourteenth century, lay religious movements that involved communal living were also spreading rapidly
across France, Germany, and the Low Countries. Even anchorites, who lived in strict enclosure,
received visitors and corresponded with spiritual brothers and sisters. See Mari Hughes-Edwards’s
Reading Medieval Anchoritism: Ideology and Spiritual Practice (Cardiff: University of Wales
Press, 2012).
21 Catherine of Siena, Dialogue, ch. 11, p. 45. Catherine, who left a period of extreme isolation in
her early years to live the rest of her life in closely knit (and often tumultuous) religious communities, is
speaking from experience here. See Karen Scott’s “ ‘This is why I have put you among your
neighbors’: St. Bernard’s and St. Catherine’s Understanding of the Love of God and Neighbor,” in Atti
del Simposio Internazionale Cateriniano-Bernardiniano, ed. D. Maffei and P. Nardi (Siena:
Accademia Senese degli Intronati, 1982), pp. 279–94.
22 As Nancy Frelick notes, mirrors become associated in this period with both “self-improvement
(moral edification or spiritual purification) and vanity (excessive pride and preoccupation with the self or
worldly goods)”; The Mirror in Medieval and Early Modern Culture: Specular Reflections, ed.
Nancy Frelick (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2016), 1–30, p. 1.
23 See also Mechthild’s Flowing Light of the Godhead, Book V, p. 186, in which God praises the
loving soul as a “mirror of inward contemplation.”
24 Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Richards (New York: Persea
Books, 1982, rev. 1998), p. 9. Christine follows the City of Ladies with a book of advice written to
women of various social stations; although the original title of this book is Le trésor de la cité des
dames (The Treasure of the City of Ladies), it is published in English with the title A Medieval
Woman’s Mirror of Honor because it was written in the mirror genre (trans. Charity Cannon Willard,
New York: Persea Books, 1989).
25 Earlier representations of practical wisdom/prudence, particularly in manuscripts, often depict the
virtue as a woman holding a book and teaching a group of women (other virtues); by the fifteenth
century, however, the mirror of self-knowledge and the snake of wisdom become Prudence’s
iconographic symbols.
26 See Anthony Celano, Aristotle’s Ethics and Medieval Philosophy: Moral Goodness and
Practical Wisdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Bonnie Kent, Virtues of the Will:
The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University
of America Press, 1995); Pierre Payer, “Prudence and the Principles of Natural Law: A Medieval
Development,” Speculum 54/1 (1979), 55–70.
27 Alexander IV, Clara claris praeclara, Bullarium Franciscanum 2 (Rome, 1761), 81, as quoted
on p. 169 of Francis and Clare: The Complete Works, trans. Regis Armstrong and Ignatius Brady
(Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1986).
28 Francis and Clare, pp. 227–8. The authorship of the Testament of Saint Clare is unclear: it’s
likely that it was composed after her death based on things she said to the Sisters at San Damiano. See
the lengthy discussion of the manuscript tradition in note 1 on p. 226.
29 Indeed, one of the most widely circulated English texts of the fifteenth century is Nicholas Love’s
Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (an English translation and adaptation of the popular
fourteenth-century Meditations on the Life of Christ).
30 Francis and Clare, third letter to Agnes of Prague, p. 200.
31 Pursuit of Wisdom, p. 34.
32 Dialogue ch. 13, p. 48. See Section 4.2 for more on the concept of dignity as it relates to
persons, especially in the fourteenth–fifteenth centuries.
33 See Jane Beal’s “The Unicorn as a Symbol for Christ in the Middle Ages,” in Illuminating Jesus
in the Middle Ages, ed. J. Beal (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 154–88.
34 Julian of Norwich, Showings, ch. 56, p. 154.
35 John Ruusbroec: The Spiritual Espousals and Other Works, ed. and trans. J. Wiseman, OSB
(Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1985), p. 55.
36 The paradox of women using humility formulae to claim religious authority is real; I discuss this is
more detail in Section 3.4 and Interlude 5, as well as in my “Lewd, Feeble, and Frail: Humility Formulae,
Medieval Women, and Authority,” in Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy 10 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, forthcoming). See also Amy Hollywood’s “Suffering Transformed: Marguerite Porete,
Meister Eckhart, and the Problem of Women’s Spirituality,” in Meister Eckhart and the Beguine
Mystics: Hadwijch of Brabant, Mechtild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete, ed. B McGinn
(New York: Continuum, 1994), pp. 87–113; also Grace Jantzen’s Power, Gender, and Christian
Mysticism. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
37 Flowing Light of the Godhead, Book VII, p. 288.
38 Hadewijch, The Complete Works, Letter 12, p. 72.
39 Dialogue, Prologue 1, p. 25.
40 Memorial IX, in Angela of Foligno: Complete Works, trans. Paul Lachance, OFM (Mahwah:
Paulist Press, 1993), p. 215.
41 Psalm 1:3–4, for instance, compares the righteous person with a flourishing tree, “planted near
running waters,” in marked contrast with the wicked, who will be dry and withered, “like dust.” Such
metaphors become particularly prominent in the thirteenth–fifteenth centuries; see Sara Ritchey,
“Spiritual Arborescence: Trees in the Medieval Christian Imagination,” Spiritus: A Journal of
Christian Spirituality 8/1 (2008), pp. 64–82.
42 Hadewijch, The Complete Works, Vision One, p. 263.
43 The Writings of Margaret of Oingt, Medieval Prioress and Mystic (d. 1310), trans. with an
introduction, essay, and notes by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 66–
7.
44 Gertrude of Helfta: The Herald of Divine Love, trans. and ed. Margaret Winkworth (Mahwah:
Paulist Press, 1993), p. 176. Trees also feature prominently in the spiritual life of fourteenth-century
Adelheid of Langmann, a nun at the Dominican monastery at Engelthal. See Leonard Hindsley’s The
Mystics of Engelthal: Writings from a Medieval Monastery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), p.
130.
45 Mechthild of Hackeborn: The Book of Special Grace, trans. Barbara Newman (Mahwah:
Paulist Press, 2017), 1.29. Significantly, this vision occurs on the Feast of the Nativity of Mary.
46 The explicit reference to all five senses here and in Marguerite d’Oingt’s vision indicate
redemption of the human body via Christ’s Incarnation. The connection between the need for
restoration of the tree of self and our need for restoration in Christ is a common theme in the thirteenth–
fifteenth centuries, often linked to Christ’s human lineage via the Tree of Jesse—an extremely popular
subject in art of this period. Jesse is typically shown sleeping (reminiscent of Adam in representations of
Eve’s creation) with a tree growing up from his side on whose branches significant descendants such as
Kings David and Solomon sit; Christ appears in the crown of the tree.
47 Many contemplative texts reference Colossians 2:7 when using this metaphor: “Therefore, just as
you received Christ Jesus as Lord, so walk in him: being rooted and built up in him.” In the Vulgate:
“Sicut ergo accepisti Christum Iesum Dominim in ipso ambulate, radicati et superaedificati in
ipso.”
48 V 57, trans. McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (1300–1500), Vol. 4 of
The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co.,
2005), p. 276.
49 All the quotes in this paragraph are from Catherine of Siena: The Dialogue, ch. 9, p. 40.
 50 The whole passage reads: “The circle in which this tree’s root, the soul’s love, must grow is true
knowledge of herself, knowledge that is joined to me, who like the circle have neither beginning nor end.
You can go round and round within this circle, finding neither end nor beginning, yet never leaving the
circle. This knowledge of yourself, and of me within yourself, is grounded in the soil of true humility,
which is as great as the expanse of the circle (which is the knowledge of yourself united with me, as I
have said). But if your knowledge of yourself were isolated from me there would be no full circle at all.
Instead, there would be a beginning in self-knowledge but apart from me it would end in confusion. So
the tree of charity is nurtured in humility and branches out in true discernment. The marrow of the tree
(that is, loving charity within the soul) is patience, a sure sign that I am in her and that she is united in
me. This tree, so delightfully planted, bears many-fragranced blossoms of virtue. Its fruit is grace for the
soul herself and blessing for her neighbors.” Later in the Dialogue (see chapter 93 for the fullest
description) Catherine contrasts this “tree of love” with the “tree of death,” rooted in pride and
selfishness.
51 The Showings of Julian of Norwich: a new translation, trans. Mirabai Starr
(Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Co., 2013), ch. 56, p. 155.
52 Ibid., p. 155.
53 Ibid., p. 154.
54 The Pursuit of Wisdom, p. 34. See also chapter 3 of Catherine of Siena’s Dialogue, where God
says to her, “If you would come to perfect knowledge and enjoyment of me, eternal Life: Never leave
the knowledge of yourself” (p. 29).
55 See Catherine of Siena, Dialogue, ch. 11, pp. 44–5: “Discernment [earlier described as “the
knowledge one ought to have of oneself and God”] has a prudence that cannot be deceived, a strength
that is invincible, a constancy right up to the end, reaching as it does from heaven to earth, that is from
the knowledge of me [Truth/God] to the knowledge of oneself, from love of me to love of one’s
neighbors.”
56 See also Hadewijch’s Letter 2, in which she explains that the end result of the hard and humbling
work of introspection is perfection via union with God: “To this end [i.e., experiencing God’s perfecting
love] you must remain humble and unexalted by all the works you can accomplish, but wise with
generous and perfect charity to sustain all things in heaven and earth.…Thus you may become perfect
and possess what is yours!” (p. 52).
57 Prologue to the Dialogue, 7, p. 36. As I discuss in more detail in Section 3.1, the key word here
is ‘selfish.’ Catherine is not denigrating sensory passions as such.
58 The language of imagination as reason’s handmaiden appears to stem from the elaborate allegory
of various mental faculties and virtues which Richard of St. Victor offers in his Twelve Patriarchs:
reason and the will are Rachel and Leah, respectively, each of whom gives birth to various virtues, and
each of whom has a handmaiden who assists them—imagination is reason’s servant, and sensuality is
the will’s. See Sections 2.1 and 3.1 for further discussion. For a detailed discussion of the role
imagination plays in medieval thought, see Michelle Karnes’s Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition
in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
59 The Pursuit of Wisdom and Other Works by the Author of the Cloud of Unknowing, ed. and
trans. James Walsh (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1988), p. 21.
60 For more on the role the Meditations plays in bringing women’s voices into contemplative
conversations, see my “From Meditation to Contemplation: Broadening the Borders of Philosophy in the
13th–15th Centuries,” in Pluralizing Philosophy’s Past—New Reflections in the History of
Philosophy, ed. A. Griffioen and M. Backmann (London: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).
61 Meditations on the Life of Christ, trans. Francis X. Taney, Anne Miller, and C. Mary Stallings-
Taney (Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 2000), p. 175.
62 Prologue to the Meditations, p. 3.
63 Meditations, ch. 107, p. 330.
64 Dialogue ch. 51, p. 105.
65 Letter 4, Hadewijch, p. 53.
66 See Steven Marrone’s The Light of Thy Countenance: Science and Knowledge of God in the
Thirteenth Century. Volume 1: A Doctrine of Divine Illumination (Leiden/Boston: Brill Academic
Publishers, 2001).
67 Twelve Patriarchs, pp. 33–4.
68 For a detailed treatment of this topic, see Denys Turner’s The Darkness of God: Negativity in
Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
69 Meister Eckhart, Counsel 4, p. 250.
70 Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. E. L. Babinsky (Mahwah: Paulist Press,
1993), ch. 135, p. 218. For the Old French text, see Le Mirouer des simple ames, ed. Romana
Guarnieri (Turnhout: Brepols, 1986).
71 Meister Eckhart, Counsel 23, p. 280.
72 V 57, trans. McGinn, Harvest of Mysticism, p. 276.
73 Tauler V 7, trans. McGinn, Harvest of Mysticism, p. 290. The spirit united with God in this way
“is so submerged in the divine abyss that it knows nothing, feels nothing, tastes nothing but a single, pure,
empty, unified God” (Tauler V 21, trans. McGinn, Harvest of Mysticism, p. 264.
74 Tauler V 47, trans. McGinn, Harvest of Mysticism.
75 Cloud of Unknowing, ch. 43, p. 98. Chapter 44 goes on to tell the prospective contemplative that
losing this basic awareness of self ultimately requires a combination of God’s grace and our disposing
ourselves to receive that grace.
76 Karma Lochrie, for instance, characterizes affective spirituality precisely in terms of “its
corporeality and the imitation of Christ’s suffering humanity” (Margery Kempe and Translations of
the Flesh, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), p. 14.
77 Nicholas Watson, “Introduction” to The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English
Mysticism, ed. S. Fanous and V. Gillespie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 2.
78 In ch. 57, Julian explains that this happens in creation: “The higher part of our human nature is
knit to God in creation, and by taking flesh, God is knit to the lower part of our human nature. And so
our twofold nature is unified in Christ” (pp. 157–8).
79 Julian, Showings, ch. 55, p. 152–3. See also ch. 57.
80 Susan Harvey, Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 157.
81 See Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the
Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992) as well as her Holy Feast and
Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1987).
82 Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 66.
83 The Writings of Margaret of Oingt, pp. 66–7.
84 Herbert Grundmann’s groundbreaking 1935 study is still authoritative; it is translated from the
original German and published as Religious Movements in the Middle Ages: The Historical Links
between Heresy, the Mendicant Orders, and the Women’s Religious Movement in the Twelfth and
Thirteenth Century, with the Historical Foundations of German Mysticism (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1995). For more on the role of women in these movements, see
Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, and Barbara Newman’s From Virile Woman to Woman
Christ: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1995).
85 For a discussion of the development of these movements in the thirteenth century, see André
Vauchez’s “Lay People’s Sanctity in Western Europe,” in Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe,
ed. R. Blumenfeld-Kosinski and T Szell (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) pp. 21–32. See also
Bernard McGinn’s The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism—1200–
1350 (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co, 1998) and Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism: 1350–
1550 (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 2016).
86 Ernest McDonnell provides a comprehensive overview in The Beguines and Berghards in
Medieval Culture: with Special Emphasis on the Belgian Scene (New York: Octagon Books, 1969).
87 See Carol Neel’s “The Origins of the Beguines,” in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society 14/2, pp. 321–41.
88 Daniel Bornstein, “Women and Religion in Late Medieval Italy: History and Historiography,” in
Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. D Bornstein and R. Rusconi, trans.
Margery Schneider (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) pp. 1–27, p. 8.
89 See Anne Winston-Allen’s Convent Chronicles: Women Writing about Women and Reform in
the Late Middle Ages (University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) and Gertrud Jaron
Lewis’s By Women, for Women, about Women: the Sister-Books of Fourteenth-Century Germany
(Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1996).
90 Bornstein, “Women and Religion in Late Medieval Italy,” p. 8.
91 Robinson, Nobility, 31.
 3
Reason and Its Limits

The perception that reason is somehow intrinsically opposed to mystical and

contemplative projects is as widespread as it is mistaken. Reason famously
occupies a central role in medieval university discussions of the twelfth–
fifteenth centuries; although contemplatives in this period remain decidedly
more ambivalent than their scholastic counterparts about the role of reason
and our intellective capacities—particularly insofar as they relate to the final
end of human life—the idea that mysticism and/or contemplativism is hostile
to rationality is misleading in (at least) two important ways. First, even
figures who ultimately advocate abandoning reason and knowledge affirm
intellect’s role both in getting the mystical project off the ground and in
progressing to the point where reason can be transcended. Second, any
number of contemplatives portray reason not as something to be overcome or
relinquished but as one of the most important ways in which we resemble or
‘image’ God, and, thus, as a crucial point of connection between human
beings and the divine.1
In Section 3.1, I establish common ground between scholastic and
contemplative attitudes towards reason, identifying key assumptions
university-based and contemplative texts share concerning human rational
faculties (most importantly, intellect and will). In Section 3.2, I begin my
examination of contemplative attitudes towards reason, beginning with the
tradition that advocates abandoning reason in order to unite with God in
love; in Section 3.3, I turn to contemplatives who instead portray reason as
an essential guide towards God. In this tradition, reason is seen as capable of
deepening love, as an essential component of faith, and as a characteristic we
share with Christ (in virtue of his humanity) and which in turn connects us
with his divinity. Section 3.4 addresses how medieval contemplatives often
experienced mystical union as strengthening their rational abilities, granting
them authority to instruct and counsel others, and providing insight into God’s
nature. At the same time, as I discuss in Section 3.5, over the course of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, formal education and specialized
knowledge (scientia) become increasingly portrayed as extraneous to the
contemplative life.

3.1 The Nature of Reason

No mere overview could hope to do justice to the complex space reason

(ratio, resoun, raison, etc.) occupies in either scholastic or contemplative
texts, much less both: it is central to discussions of epistemology,
metaphysics, philosophy of mind, moral psychology, logic, ethics, theology,
and more. Because reason plays so many roles in so many sorts of
conversations, it would be an error to try to pin the concept down too
narrowly; instead, I will follow the lead of my medieval subjects in
respecting reason’s nuanced and complex nature. At the same time,
scholastics and contemplatives in the thirteenth-fifteenth centuries share a
general understanding of what reason is and how it works.
First and foremost, reason is understood in the Middle Ages as one of the
chief powers among the ‘rational capacities’—capacities that were viewed
as setting the human being apart from other animals. Medieval discussions
followed their ancient predecessors in dividing the sets of capacities found
in living beings into three basic and hierarchically ordered categories:
vegetative, sensory, and rational. Plants, for instance, can take in nutrition,
grow, and reproduce, while animals are able to do these things and also
perceive, desire, and move around things in the world around them. Plants
were thus described as having ‘vegetative’ or ‘nutritive’ capacities, while
animals were described as having ‘sensory’ or ‘sensitive’ capacities. Human
beings possess not only vegetative and sensory capacities, but also the ability
to make second-order judgments about those perceptions, desires, and
movements, to engage in reasoning and argumentation, and to desire and
choose things under abstract labels such as ‘the good’ and ‘the true.’ These
were then described as ‘rational’ capacities and divided into two categories
according to how closely related they were to material and sensory concerns.
Imagination and sensory memory were seen as dependent on matter (because
they require sensory input to function), while reason, intellect, will,
understanding, and intellective memory were seen as transcending matter
(because they deal first and foremost with universal concepts rather than
particulars).
‘Reason’ and ‘rational’ are used in this period to refer both to the whole
set of intellectual capacities (as when angels are described as rational
beings; for more on rationality generally, see Chapter 5) and to a particular
power among those capacities. In this second, narrower sense, reason is the
power to make judgments, construct arguments, and gain knowledge of
concrete and abstract truths. Reason is both a discursive and dialectical
power, meaning that reason’s investigations proceed in stages, moving from
one premise to another in order to arrive at conclusions (as opposed to
grasping a priori truths in their essence or grasping entire arguments at a
glance, which is what the faculty of understanding does). In contrast to the
will—an appetite for the good, linked with desires—reason is a ‘logical’
faculty in the Greek sense of logos: it is intrinsically linked with human
linguistic abilities.
Its discursive and dialectical nature makes reason a popular subject in
medieval literature with a contemplative or moralistic bent, particularly texts
written in dialogue form. Augustine’s Soliloquies, for instance, feature a
dialogue between Augustine and Reason, and Philosophy herself famously
appears to Boethius in the Consolation of Philosophy (as he sits in his
prison cell composing sad poetry) in order to encourage him to think
rationally about his fate and to instruct him about the nature of true
happiness.2 Following these literary and philosophical precedents, reason is
—as we’ll see in Section 3.2—frequently personified in later medieval texts
as a conversational foil for protagonists grappling with moral and/or
spiritual questions. (See Chapter 5 for further discussion of personification
in medieval contemplative literature.)
This personification is also used to clarify the role of reason in relation to
the other faculties of the soul, particularly the will. The same debate about
the relative roles of knowledge and love that occupies scholastic texts
(namely, whether knowledge or love is the primary act in our union with
God) also appears in contemplative texts in this period.3 Yet, while
scholastic discussions of reason are written in Latin, appeal frequently to
authority, and are aimed at presenting the truth in the systematic, objective
manner of a classroom, contemplative discussions are composed in the
emerging vernaculars as well as Latin, expressed in a variety of genres
(including dialogues, poetry, mirrors, letters, and visionary literature), and
tend to be more dynamic.4 In this way, contemplative discussions of the topic
provide an important complement to scholastic sources on the question of
what reason is and what role it plays in the ultimate end of human life. As
we’ll see, reason (taken in the narrower sense outlined above) is consistently
understood as a faculty essential for negotiating the material world, for
gaining knowledge of abstract truths, and for knowing ourselves (see also
Chapter 2). Yet the faculty of reason cannot itself get us all the way to our
final end, whether that end be understood as intellective union with God or
as selfless union with Love.

3.2 Taking Leave of Reason

Contemplative and mystical philosophy and theology are often thought to be

anti-rational—committed to the view that reaching our ultimate end requires
abandoning reason (and the knowledge it produces) in the journey towards a
Divine that transcends thought and experience. Although this is hardly the
whole story (as we’ve seen already in Chapters 1 and 2 and will see further
in Sections 3.3 and 3.4), it is true that there is at least an apophatic bent in
much medieval contemplative writing. By the end of the thirteenth century,
frustration with the elitism of the university system and its increasingly
specialized discussions was leading a number of contemplatives to
downplay and/or criticize the usefulness of reason in attaining theological
ends, and this tendency increases throughout the fourteenth century.5 In
reason’s place, these contemplatives emphasized the primacy of love and, in
some cases, a loss of self so radical that its proponents spoke of emptying
themselves so completely that only God remains.6 Yet even in the most
extreme of these cases, reason has a role to play in helping the text’s
audience understand what the journey to God both does and does not entail.
We find a simple example of this in Book Two of Mechthild of
Magdeburg’s late-thirteenth-century Flowing Light of the Godhead. Drawing
on the popular literary tropes of fin’amor (today often called ‘courtly love’)
epitomized by the Arthurian legends of Lancelot and Guinevere and Tristan
and Isolde, Mechthild presents a dialogue between Lady Soul and Lady
Knowledge in which Lady Knowledge asks the Loving Soul—praised as the
image of God and depicted as a bride with “noble longing” and “boundless
desire” for God—to say something to her about the “ineffable intimacy” that
exists between her and God.7 In response, Lady Soul replies:
Lady Knowledge, that I shall not do.
Brides may not tell everything they experience.
…
My privileged experience of God must always be hidden

From you and all creatures except for myself.8

Lady Knowledge must remain content merely to praise the image of God she
sees in Lady Soul, “my mistress and my queen,” rather than being privy to an
understanding of the soul’s union with God. Mechthild often depicts the Soul
in this way—namely, as a bride whose desires are fulfilled by God in ways
that she cannot share with Reason, thus emphasizing the apophatic aspect of
such union.9
Mechthild also takes aim at professors of theology and others trained in
argumentative reasoning in a passage in which she expresses worry that her
book won’t be taken seriously because it’s written by a woman outside the
formal systems of knowledge.10 In response God assures her that “the course
of the Holy Spirit flows by nature downhill,” illuminating and inspiring the
lowly, and then takes a bit of a dig at the university set:
One finds many a professor learned in scripture who is actually a fool in my eyes.
And I’ll tell you something else:
It is a great honor for me with regard to them, and it very much strengthens Holy Christianity

That the unlearned mouth, aided by my Holy Spirit, teaches the learned tongue.11

In short, knowledge of Scripture doesn’t necessarily lead to wisdom,

whereas Christianity’s claim to divine inspiration is made stronger by
wisdom being preached by the less erudite.
This skepticism about reason’s ability to access divine wisdom (and, in
the process, unite human souls with God) not only appears in texts throughout
the fourteenth–fifteenth centuries but is amplified in texts that advocate
abnegation of the self to the point where no experience of human
individuality is left and only God remains. In this tradition, reason’s primary
role is to demonstrate what it is that the contemplative needs to relinquish,
and how clinging to arguments and explanations can impede the process.
Perhaps the most extreme example of this tradition is the early-fourteenth-
century Mirror of Simple Souls, written by Marguerite Porete, who was
burnt at the stake in Paris in 1310 for refusing to recant the views in it judged
heretical by a Dominican inquest. Like Mechthild of Magdeburg’s Flowing
Light, Porete’s Mirror draws on the fin’amor tradition and is cast (at least
initially) as a dialogue between three noble ladies: Reason, Soul, and Love.
Throughout the conversation, which is divided into 136 brief chapters, Lady
Love tries to convince Lady Soul to empty herself of everything that is not
Love and to herself become Love. As early in chapter 7, Lady Love tells
Lady Reason that nothing remains in the individual intellect of the soul
annihilated in love;12 true to character, though, Reason keeps asking
questions and demanding answers and explanations. In chapter 21, for
instance, Reason asks Love who she is, and receives the following reply: “I
am God,” says Love, “For Love is God and God is Love, and this Soul is
God by the condition of Love. I am God by divine nature and this Soul is
God by righteousness of Love. Thus, this precious beloved of mine is taught
and guided by me, without herself, for she is transformed into me.”13
Not surprisingly, Reason doesn’t understand what Love is telling her and
continues her inquiry, while Love and the Soul become increasingly
frustrated with the barrage of questions. As Love comments in Chapter 43,
“Ah Reason, you will always be one-eyed, you and all those who are fed by
your doctrine. For, to be sure, one has faulty vision who sees things before
her eyes and does not understand them at all. And so it is with you.”14
Reason’s one-sided view isn’t able to encompass the full scope of Love’s
vision for the Soul; later, Lady Soul herself complains that Reason’s
questions have made the book longer than it should be, “because of the
answers you need, both for yourself and for those whom you nourish who
move along at a snail’s pace.”15 Although important dialectically for
explaining the overall goal of the Mirror and making initial distinctions (e.g.,
between Love and the virtues), as the conversation continues, Reason
becomes ‘that guy’—the one whose constant questioning gets in the way of
making any progress—and impedes the Soul’s movement towards the goal of
emptying herself of all thought and all will to merge in undifferentiated union
with Love.
When in chapter 87 Lady Soul begins to realizes that goal, seeing that
Love “has no beginning, no end, and no limit” and declaring, “I am nothing
except Love,” Lady Reason is so overcome by this pronouncement that she
perishes.16 The Soul’s response is to rejoice: “Why did it take so long, this
death!…For as long as I had you, Lady Reason, I could not freely receive my
inheritance, what was and is mine. But now I can receive it freely, since I
have wounded you to death with Love.” By the end of the Mirror, Love alone
speaks, explaining that Lady Soul now “retains nothing more of herself in
nothingness, because God is sufficient of Himself, that is, because He is and
she is not. Thus she is stripped of all things because she is without existence,
where she was before she was.”17 In this selfless union, in which Soul has
lost all individuality and exists in God in the same way she did before she
was created, human reason has no place. When Love announces in her final
soliloquy that “The whole is one to [the Soul] without an explanation
[propter quid], and she is nothing in such a one,”18 she is announcing that
such a soul has moved beyond any need for even the highest form of
knowledge (scientia) achievable via reason, for according to the scholastic
logical tradition that takes Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics as its central
textbook, demonstrations propter quid are what lead to scientia in its
strictest sense: necessary truths arrived at via demonstrative syllogisms from
premises known a priori.
Although Porete’s views were condemned along with her, parts of the
Mirror (with her name removed) were distributed in Latin and vernacular
collections and influenced later contemplatives. The Mirror’s most famous
influence was on Meister Eckhart’s views on detachment and self-
abnegation.19 Eckhart, who lived in the Dominican chapterhouse in Paris
during parts of Porete’s three-year imprisonment and trial, maintains that one
of the most important things we must detach from is our reliance on the
natural faculty of reason and the knowledge it produces. In making this claim,
moreover, Eckhart sometimes contrasts the knowledge that comes through
sense perceptions and reason from the sort of knowing that links us most
closely with God. As he comments in Sermon 76:
The soul has something in it, a spark of intelligence, which never goes out…There also exists in
our souls a capacity for knowing external things. This is a knowing through the senses and
 through reason, that is, a knowing through sensible images and through concepts. Such knowing
conceals this other knowing from us. How are we Sons of God? By having one being with
him.20

Here, as in Porete’s Mirror, we find the idea that the sort of knowledge
which human beings acquire through reason can actively impede the most
relevant ‘inner’ sort of wisdom—something that reason can neither grasp
itself nor assist in the recognition of. Detachment releases our hold on
individuality so that we can draw closer to this shared being and the
corresponding surrender of egoistic self: “If I am to know God without
means, without images, and without likeness, God actually has to become me,
and I have to become God.”21 Reason may be necessary for negotiating the
material world, but on this view the unknowable God utterly transcends
human rational faculties (as well as being itself).
We also find this attitude towards reason in some English texts, such as
the fourteenth-century Cloud of Unknowing. Like Porete and Eckhart, the
Cloud recognizes reason as one of the principal powers of the human soul; it
describes it as a power that “helps us distinguish the evil from the good, the
bad from the worse, the good from the better, the worse from the worst, and
the better from the best.”22 Yet reason and thought cannot assist us in attaining
the heights of union with God. Only love can do this: “No matter how sacred,
no thought can ever promise to help you in the work of contemplative prayer,
because only love—not knowledge—can help us reach God.”23 The Book of
Privy Counseling (anonymous but likely written by the same author as the
Cloud) makes the same point, using the Old Testament story of Rachel, who
dies giving birth to Benjamin, to emphasize the importance of self-
annihilating contemplative love over human rational powers:
Benjamin represents contemplation, and Rachel represents reason. As soon as seekers of God
are touched by genuine contemplation, they work to make themselves nothing and God
everything, and in this high, noble decision, it’s as if their reason dies…Benjamin is a symbol of
all contemplatives who experience the ecstasy of love that takes them beyond the powers of the
mind.24

3.3 Reason as Guide

The idea that reason itself cannot reach all the way to contemplation of God
is a common theme in both contemplative and scholastic texts. Thomas
Aquinas begins the Summa theologiae, for instance, by distinguishing
between knowledge gained by the “light of natural reason” and the
knowledge gained by the “light of divine revelation,”25 arguing that human
beings cannot reach their ultimate end relying on reason alone. Yet in contrast
to the views discussed in Section 3.2, most contemplatives in the thirteenth–
fifteenth centuries view reason as an indispensable help towards attaining
that end. Reason can guide us towards God, and it can also increase and
deepen our love for God (as opposed to impeding it). In fact, reason is often
viewed as an essential component of faith, as well as a faculty we have in
common with the Incarnate Christ.
The influential early-twelfth-century Hugh of St. Victor, for instance,
maintained that reason both can—and should—bear a close and mutually
beneficial relationship to theology and contemplation; Richard of St. Victor
expands on this idea in his Twelve Patriarchs, painstakingly analogizing each
of the figures in the biblical story to illustrate the relation between the
various faculties of the human soul and various virtues.26 Reason is
personified as Rachel, the beloved wife of Jacob, while Jacob’s less-loved
wife, Leah, represents affection and the will. This choice underscores the
Victorine emphasis on reason as the most important of the soul’s rational
faculties: while affection results in virtue, reason results in truth.27 Illumined
directly by God, Rachel/reason’s role is “to meditate, to contemplate, to
distinguish, and to understand.”28
Reason’s natural pursuit of wisdom is identified as our proper goal in this
life. Yet, just as the matriarch Rachel dies giving birth to her son Benjamin,
so reason is ultimately superseded in the highest form of contemplation: “The
mind, having been carried away to contemplation [by the light of divinity],
experiences how great the failure of human reason is. Let no person suppose
that he is able to penetrate to the splendor of that divine light by
argumentation; let no person believe that he is able to comprehend it by
human reasoning.”29 God’s illumination and grace must bridge the gap
between human capacities and vision of the divine essence: the intellective
union with God that the Victorines portray as our final end is not one in
which discursive reason and argumentation can play a part. At the same time,
it is reason (rather than the will) that is understood as the highest among
natural human faculties on this view, and it is reason (rather than love) that is
directly responsible for the work that ultimately gives birth to contemplation
of God.
A quite different personification of reason plays a similar role in Alan of
Lille’s late-twelfth-century allegorical poem Anticlaudianus. At the outset of
the poem, Nature decides she wants to make an ideal human being but soon
realizes that the soul for this human being will need to be created directly by
God. It is Reason who then devises a plan for requesting this soul from God:
she suggests that Phronesis (practical wisdom or prudence) be the messenger,
and she commissions the seven liberal arts to build a chariot in which
Phronesis can go to heaven and make Nature’s request. Once the chariot is
constructed, Reason harnesses the five senses to it as horses, and she begins
to drive Phronesis towards God. When they reach the end of the created
universe, however, the senses refuse to go farther, and Reason herself falters.
Eventually, Phronesis goes ahead with the help of Theology and Faith, with
Reason rejoining her for the return journey.
Although Reason’s skill in negotiating the material world and in
progressing via immaterial truths gained from the material world cannot take
us all the way to union with God, Reason is still portrayed as the most
important of the human rational faculties—without her, there would be no
plan, no vehicle for leading Phronesis towards God, and no forward motion
for that vehicle. The highest form of contemplation is born from reason, not
affection or the will, and practical wisdom is a virtue closely related to
reason. In this way, Richard of St. Victor’s and Alan of Lille’s texts
exemplify themes common to many twelfth- and thirteenth-century scholastic
texts. Reason allows us to transcend the material world of particulars and to
access the realm of immaterial truths and immaterial beings; at the same time
(as we saw Aquinas note above), the natural light of reason is not enough in
itself to connect us to God in a way that fully satisfies either our intellects or
our wills. According to the Victorines and Aquinas, the only thing that can
satisfy both perfectly is everlasting contemplation of God’s essence—an act
which God makes possible via grace and illumination of our intellects.30
When Lady Reason appears as the first of the three virtues who helps
Christine de Pizan build the City of Ladies, then, Pizan is directly referencing
a robust tradition.31 Although The City of Ladies is (like the Anticlaudianus)
not a contemplative text per se, Pizan’s personification of Reason—who is
identified as a daughter of God—draws on a number of contemplative and
philosophical tropes. In addition to channeling Boethius’s Lady Philosophy
in both appearance and manner of address, for instance, Reason also carries
the mirror of self-knowledge instead of a scepter. (See Figure 3.1.) As
Reason tells Christine, “No one can look into this mirror, no matter what kind
of creature, without achieving clear self-knowledge.…Thanks to this mirror,
the essences, qualities, proportions, and measures of all things are known,
nor can anything be done well without it.”32 Reason then tells the stories of a
host of women who are celebrated for their knowledge, wisdom, and
scientific innovations and discoveries. In this way, she helps Christine lay
the foundation of her city, in which women can live safely, and to whose
fortress (completed by Rectitude and Justice) the Queen of Reason—the
Virgin Mary—is welcomed.

Figure 3.1 Lady Reason with mirror and laying foundation with Christine,
Cité des dames, c.1410–14, Harley MS 4431, f. 290r, British Library.

Reason is also frequently portrayed in contemplative texts as helping the

will’s proper work (namely, desiring the good, whose ultimate manifestation
is God). Aquinas’s contemporary Bonaventure, for instance, agrees that the
knowledge we acquire through rational investigation is distinct from
knowledge we gain via doctrine or revelation.33 Yet Bonaventure is not
inclined to give intellect supreme place among our rational faculties. Instead,
he identifies the will as the soul’s noblest faculty and accordingly stresses
the role of the will and love in attaining our ultimate end. (In this, he is
joined by a number of thirteenth–fifteenth-century contemplatives and later
Franciscans such as, famously, Duns Scotus.) The claim that love is more
central than reason in attaining our ultimate end is importantly different,
however, from the claim of Porete, Eckhart, and Tauler that natural reason
impedes the love by which we are united to God. In fact, a number of mystics
famous for their emphasis on the power and primacy of love—including
Hadewijch, Catherine of Siena, and Julian of Norwich—view the faculty of
reason as able both to assist and to enhance that love.
Hadewijch, for instance, portrays our ultimate end as the ‘fruition of love’
in which we can “be God with God”34—but she makes it clear that this end
is not one we can reach without relying extensively on reason’s guidance. As
she writes in a letter of advice, “The power of [inner] sight has two eyes:
love and reason.…These two are of great mutual help to the other; for reason
instructs love, and love enlightens reason. When reason abandons itself to
love’s wish, and love consents to be forced and held within the bounds of
reason, they can accomplish a very great work.”35 Love is a powerful
motivating and unifying force, but it needs reason both to hold it in check and
to direct it towards its proper end. In another letter, Hadewijch explains that
we need wisdom as well as desire to fulfill love’s quest: “This is why the
bride of whom we read in the Song of Songs (3:4) sought her Bridegroom
not only with desire but with wisdom; and when she had found him, she was
no less anxious to hold him. Every wise soul who has been strongly stirred
by love should be likewise.”36 On this view, reason does not damp down but,
rather, fans the flames of rightly directed love.
Hadewijch also regularly portrays reason as helping the soul attain its
highest end—love’s union with the Beloved (God)—in her poems.
Employing tropes of fin’amor to create a new genre, called minnemystik
(see also Interlude 4), Hadewijch casts the searching soul as a knight and
Reason as a cautionary voice who ultimately holds the key to reaching the
culmination of Love.37 In one poem, Reason seems at first unsympathetic
with the soul’s quest for Love: when the soul comes crying to Reason for
advice after being abandoned by Love, Reason says, “Reflect that you are
still a human being!,” strips the soul of the fine clothing Love had given her,
and teaches her to “live the truth.” Eventually, however, the soul develops
self-knowledge and—armed with this truth—continues her quest for genuine,
lasting union with Love. The poem ends with a stanza explaining that perfect
love requires the assistance of reason:
May God grant to all who love
That they may win the favor of Reason,
By which they may know
How fruition of Love is attained.
In winning the favor of Reason
Lies for us the whole perfection of Love.38

In another poem, Hadewijch describes reason’s role as making it clear to the

soul where she is falling short in her status as “loved one for the Beloved.”
This role is both painful and necessary. Reason is described as Love’s
surgeon (the most skilled of physicians in this period), who cuts as well as
heals in guiding us towards our ultimate end:
Reason herself is Love’s surgeoness:
She can best heal all faults against Love.
To him who adroitly follows all Reason’s moves,
In all the ways in which she leads him,
She will speak of new wonders:
“Behold! Take possession of the highest glory!”39

The figure of reason also appears as both vital for and subordinate to the
fulfillment of Love in several of Hadewijch’s visions. In Vision 9, for
instance, Hadewijch sees Reason as a queen attended by three handmaids:
Holy Fear, who keeps track of our progress in the ‘life of love’;
Discernment, who distinguishes Love’s will, kingdom, and pleasure from
Reason’s; and Wisdom, who allows us to perceive how great Reason’s
power and works are when Reason lets herself be led by Love.40 Reason
initially dominates Hadewijch by putting her foot on her throat but becomes
subject to Hadewijch once she is named, and the vision ends with Hadewijch
lost in the embrace of Love. In Vision 12, Hadewijch sees Reason as one of
twelve attendants who prepare the loving soul for union with her Beloved
(God). Reason’s role here is to guide and remind the soul of what God
wants.41 As the bride, clad in a robe “made of her undivided and perfect
will,” approaches the throne, Hadewijch sees that she herself is that bride
and experiences love’s fulfillment in union with God. Throughout
Hadewijch’s works, reason guides us all the way to our highest end: love’s
ultimate union with the Beloved.
Catherine of Siena also emphasizes the role of reason in attaining the
“perfection of [the] unitive state in which souls are carried off by the fire of
love.” Her Dialogue, for instance, describes knowledge and love as an
upward spiral: “For love follows upon understanding. The more they know,
the more they love, and the more they love, the more they know. Thus each
nourishes the other.”42 Artistic representations from this period sometimes
portray this dual relationship by having cherubim and seraphim (the highest
orders of the angels, associated with wisdom and love and typically
portrayed as blue and red) appear around Mary or Christ. (See Figure 3.2, in
which Mary, surrounded by cherubim and seraphim, holds the infant Jesus
while the Magi pay their respects.) An emphasis on the mutually beneficial
relationship between love and knowledge is one of the hallmarks of
Catherine’s works; in this, she echoes not just Thomas Aquinas’s conception
of the Beatific Vision but also Dante’s early-fourteenth-century Paradiso.
Catherine’s image of the tree of self (see Chapter 2) has rational discernment
grafted right into the trunk of charity,43 and God’s favorite expression for
human beings in the Dialogue is “la mia creatura che à in sé ragione,” (as
when God entreats Catherine to “Open your mind’s eye and look within me,”
for then she will see the “dignity and beauty of my creature who has reason
within herself”).44 Love unites us with God on this picture, but it is reason
that leads the way.
Figure 3.2 Detail of Adoration of the Magi, Andrea Mantegna, mid-
fifteenth century, Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

Reason is also vital for faith for many of these contemplatives. Catherine,
for instance, writes that “it is in reason that the light of faith is held, and one
cannot lose the one without losing the other.”45 She supports this claim by
arguing that the groundwork for faith is created in us as part of the imago
Dei. We see God when we look into ourselves, and a central part of what we
see is reason. As the Dialogue immediately continues, in God’s voice: “I
made the soul after my own image and likeness, giving her memory,
understanding, and will.” Memory, understanding, and will are all rational
capacities, as we saw in Section 3.1, famously linked together in trinitarian
form by Augustine—and a standard way by the thirteenth century of
explaining the relation between and use of those faculties.46 Drawing on this
same trio, the late-fourteenth–early-fifteenth-century English anchorite Julian
of Norwich describes our faith as “a combination of the natural love of the
soul, the clear light of reason, and the steadfast remembrance of God instilled
in us when we were created.”47 Rather than impeding faith, on this view
reason is central to its flourishing. On Aquinas’s view, for instance, God’s
grace completes rather than destroys human nature, allowing reason a role
even in areas reason can’t attain on its own. The realm of faith (and theology)
is one in which reason examines matters that lie beyond its natural powers
via God’s grace.48
Contemplatives who embrace rather than eschew reason’s ongoing role in
the spiritual life also tend to stress the humanity of the incarnate Christ as a
point of connection between us and the Triune God.49 Hadewijch, for
example, consoles a fellow beguine by linking the hard work and suffering of
Christ’s human life with the eternal enjoyment of Christ’s divinity: “With the
Humanity of God you must live here on earth, in the labors and sorrow of
exile, while within your soul you love and rejoice with the omnipotent and
eternal Divinity in sweet abandonment. For the truth of both is one single
fruition.”50 Catherine of Siena makes a similar point when she describes a
vision of Christ in which he appeared as a tree reaching to heaven but
grounded in humanity: “I [Christ] showed myself to you under the figure of a
tree. You could see neither its bottom nor its top. But you saw that its root
was joined to the earth—and this was the divine nature joined to the earth of
your humanity.”51 Earlier in the Dialogue, Catherine describes the humanity
of Christ—and therefore all human beings—as inextricably mixed with the
divinity of God: “When my Son was lifted up on the wood of the most holy
cross, he did not cut off his divinity from the lowly earth of your humanity. So
though he was raised so high he was not raised off the earth. In fact, his
divinity is kneaded into the clay of your humanity like one bread.”52 This
homely metaphor of divinity kneaded together with humanity makes a
profound theological point; Catherine is consistent in her emphasis on the
restoration of all our human faculties through Christ.
Julian of Norwich also stresses the restoration of humanity and human
faculties through the Incarnation. Her initial vision is of Christ’s head
bleeding profusely from the crown of thorns, and the ‘dearworthy’ blood of
Jesus plays a crucial role in her Showings; it is his taking on human nature
that allows our ‘sensuality’ (sensory bodies) and all their faculties to be
redeemed. Julian’s Long Text spends a significant amount of time musing on
the Trinity, in which the Second Person (Christ) is consistently linked with
knowledge and wisdom. As she writes in chapter 58, “In the Second Person,
in knowledge and wisdom, we have our perfection as regards our sensuality,
our restoration and our salvation, for he is our Mother, brother, and savior.”53
Rather than advocating the need to annihilate reason, Julian sees not only our
rational faculties but also our bodies as important points of connection to the
God with whom we unite in our final end.

3.4 Reason as Enhanced by Mystical Union

To this point, I’ve focused primarily on the role reason plays in helping us
attain our ultimate end, for that is the area in which we see most clearly the
range of contemplative perspectives on the topic; yet reason appears on the
‘receiving’ end of this equation as well. Mystical union is regularly
portrayed in the twelfth–fifteenth centuries (in a wide range of geographic
regions, religious orders, and languages) as both resulting in practical and
theoretical knowledge and increasing rational abilities in ways that grant
their subjects authority to instruct and counsel others, as well as providing
insight into God’s nature. Julian, for instance, reports being enlightened—
rather than awed to apophatic silence—by the mystical experience she
recounts in the Showings or Revelations of Divine Love. She reworks her
original ‘short’ text over the following twenty years, incorporating the
continued insights her experience continues to grant her. This ‘long’ text,
which is approximately six times as long as the earlier version, is
theologically rich, complex, and highly influential.54 For contemplatives like
Julian, mystical union does not render rational powers moot (or mute), but
rather fulfills and enhances them.
The late-thirteenth-century Cistercian nun Gertrude of Helfta, for instance,
describes the divine inspiration she receives as allowing her to effortlessly
write “of things which I did not know before, as though it were a lesson long
since learned by heart.”55 Angela of Foligno, a Franciscan tertiary, also
testifies that her experiences of mystical union grant her theological insights
she did not previously possess. In fact, Angela explains that when she is
present at the ‘secret levels’ of God, she gains a profound understanding of
Scripture:
Because my soul is often elevated into the secret levels of God and sees the divine secrets, I am
able to understand how the Scriptures were written; how they are made easy and difficult; how
they seem to say something and contradict it; how some derive no profit from them; how those
 who do not observe them are damned and Scripture is fulfilled in them; and how others who
observe them are saved by them.56

This claim seems hubristic (to say the least), but Angela is quick both to
attribute such knowledge to direct contact with God and to explain that the
knowledge remains in its purest form only as long as her experience of union
lasts. As the experience fades, she says, she loses the ability to put the
knowledge into words.57
At the same time, Angela also claims that she is united with Christ (whom
she also calls ‘the God-man’) “almost continually” and that he often speaks
to her in this state. In that condition, she says, “I see myself as alone with
God, totally cleansed, totally sanctified, totally true, totally upright, totally
certain, totally celestial in him.”58 Reason is not transcended in this form of
union, although it involves mutual ‘resting’ in each other: “On one occasion,
when I was in that state, God told me: ‘Daughter of divine wisdom, temple of
the beloved, beloved of the beloved, daughter of peace, in you rests the
entire Trinity; indeed, the complete truth rests in you, so that you hold me and
I hold you.’ ”59 This statement echoes the self-abnegating language that we
saw from Porete and Eckhart in Subsection 3.2, where we can become God
in the sense that we empty ourselves so completely that there is nothing left
of us as human individuals, but here it appears more as self-fulfillment than
self-annihilation. Later, Angela describes the knowledge she gains from these
conversations with God as including both her understanding of and love for
the Eucharist: “One of the effects of that state in my soul is to greatly increase
my delight and understanding of how God comes into the sacrament of the
altar accompanied by his host.”60
The practical effects of mystical union are underappreciated in most
studies of the topic, but in the case of many medieval mystics they are also
striking. Julian of Norwich, for instance, becomes so famous a spiritual
advisor despite her enclosure in an anchorage that people—most famously
Margery Kempe—come from miles away to seek her counsel. A particularly
notable example of the practical effects of mystical union can be found in the
case of Margaret Ebner, an early-fourteenth-century German Dominican
nun,61 who reports receiving a gift of “divine understanding” that has
enhanced her rational powers to the point where she has become the subject
of much conversation:
 The next day I was very sick and began to wonder about what was happening to me. I
perceived well what it was. It came from my heart and I feared for my senses now and then
whenever it was so intense. But I was answered by the presence of God with sweet delight, “I
am no robber of the senses, I am the enlightener of the senses.” I received a great grace from
the inner goodness of God; the light of truth of divine understanding. Also, my mind became
more rational than before, so that I had the grace to be able to phrase all my speech better and
also to understand better all speech according to the truth. Since then I am often talked about.62

Margaret’s experience is significant along several dimensions. First, the self-

knowledge she demonstrates at the outset allows her to hear God’s
reassurance. Second, the reassurance that God is an ‘enlightener’ rather than
a ‘robber’ of the senses (a phrase which also appears later in the
Revelations) highlights fulfillment of self as opposed to its annihilation.63
Most importantly for our purposes, the gift of wisdom Margaret receives
is explicitly linked to increased rational abilities. She even offers external
support for her claims—the fact that she is now “often talked about.” She
also explains later that this gift allows her to “understand, read, and write”
what she could not before, as well as to tell when someone is either lying or
unaware of their true intentions: “And a new understanding of truth was
granted me, with which I can often detect when someone speaks untruthfully
in my presence.…Sometimes I notice that someone intends these things in the
heart differently from what comes out of the mouth. Then I respond according
to the intention and not to the words.”64 In Ebner’s case, as in the others, the
beneficial effects of divinely enhanced reason extend beyond the individual
to her broader community.

3.5 Scientia vs. Sapientia

Medieval contemplative conceptions of the relation between reason and our

final end are far more complex than often acknowledged. Rather than
uniformly counseling us to abandon reason on the path towards selfless union
with the Divine, contemplatives in the twelfth–fifteenth centuries advocate
taking a variety of attitudes towards reason and report having a variety of
unitive experiences with respect to it. (See Chapter 5 for a discussion of such
unitive experiences as foretastes of immortality.) At the same time, the need
for formal education and technical knowledge (scientia) become
increasingly portrayed as extraneous to the contemplative life over the course
of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
The medieval use of scientia as both a general and a specific term
reaches back to Augustine, who uses it broadly to refer to human knowledge
of the truth and narrowly to refer to knowledge of changing, material realities
(in opposition to sapientia or wisdom, which refers to knowledge of eternal,
unchanging divine truths).65 By the twelfth century, scientia is widely used as
a general word for ‘knowledge’; it gains new technical significance in the
thirteenth century, however, once the Latin translation of Aristotle’s
Posterior Analytics begins to be intensively studied in the universities.66 As
scientia becomes increasingly associated with university debates, however,
there is a general move away from incorporating either its technical or
general understanding into the contemplative life—part of the well-
documented shift in this period towards what’s often called ‘personal
piety.’67
In Marguerite Porete’s The Mirror of Simple Souls, for instance, a crucial
component of what we need to renounce is knowledge or scientific
understanding: “The whole is one to her without an explanation [propter
quid], and she is nothing in such a one.”68 The use of the phrase “propter
quid” here is significant because, according to the Aristotelian medieval
logical tradition, demonstrations propter quid are what lead to scientia in its
technical sense—that is, a necessary conclusion reached by means of a
demonstrative syllogism whose premises are known a priori. Henry Suso’s
Wisdom’s Watch upon the Hours (Horologium Sapientiae) also warns
against intellectual pride and encourages a simple, humble devotion as the
route to marriage with divine Wisdom (understood both as the figure from
scriptural wisdom literature and as the second person of the Trinity).69 Lay
disenchantment with scientia in the later Middle Ages is widespread: the
Latin text of the fourteenth-century English Cloud of Unknowing draws an
explicit distinction between scientia and sapientia, contrasting worldly or
scientific knowledge with the wisdom that comes from loving God, and
Thomas à Kempis’s fifteenth-century De Imitatione Christi—one of the most
popular devotional books of the Middle Ages—stresses virtue and a life of
love over academic knowledge. As Kempis remarks, “What good is a
brilliant argument about hidden and obscure matters when God does not
judge us by our knowledge of such things?…Why should we bother about
clever arguments and subtle reasoning?”70
The idea that formal education and scientia are extraneous to attaining
wisdom is summed up brilliantly in a passage from Book II of Mechthild of
Magdeburg’s Flowing Light of the Godhead (part of which we saw in
Subsection 3.2). After she expresses worry about her status as an ‘unlearned’
woman, God assures Mechthild that all will be well:
Daughter, many a wise man, because of negligence
On a big highway, has lost his precious gold
With which he was hoping to go to a famous school.
  Someone is going to find it.
By nature I have acted accordingly many a day.
Wherever I bestowed special favors,
I always sought out the lowest, most insignificant, and
 most unknown place for them.
…
It is a great honor for me with regard to them, and it
 very much strengthens Holy Christianity
That the unlearned mouth, aided by my Holy Spirit,
 teaches the learned tongue.71

In short, the path to God is open to anyone who is willing to follow it. In
Chapter 4 we’ll see the central role that the will and love come to play in
finding and following this path.

Interlude Three

When Did Reading Become a Sign of Religious Devotion for

Women?

For those (like me) who were taught that women weren’t generally allowed
to read or write in the Middle Ages, it is striking how frequently medieval
women are portrayed in religious art from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries
as holding, reading, and even writing books. (See Figure I3.1, in which St.
Humility instructs her sisters are they write; Figure I3.2, in which Mary
composes her Magnificat; and Figure I1.2, in which Bridget of Sweden
writes her Revelations.) These images appear everywhere from Sweden,
Germany, and the Low Countries to France, Italy, and beyond, and they
appear in all types of media: statuary, stained glass, paintings, altarpieces,
carvings, frescoes, illuminated manuscripts, etc. Mary is the woman most
often portrayed this way, both because of her status as the mother of Christ—
referred to at the outset of John’s gospel as the Logos, typically translated as
‘the Word’—and because of her association with wisdom.72 (See Figure
I3.3, in which Mary has multiple books open in front of her as the Holy Spirit
descends, as well as Figures 4.1, 4.2, and 4.4.) Yet Mary is hardly unique in
this respect. The iconography of any number of female saints also includes
books—St. Barbara, one of the patron saints of the Catholic Church, typically
holds the church in one hand and a book in the other, for instance, while
Catherine of Alexandria, a patron saint of the Dominican Order celebrated
for having refuted no fewer than fifty pagan philosophers before being
stretched on the wheel and finally decapitated, is frequently shown reading a
book while standing atop one of the men she has refuted. (See Figure I3.4.)
As reading becomes an activity increasingly associated with female piety in
the later Middle Ages, women are increasingly represented as holding or
reading books as a way of signifying their devotion to God.73
Figure I3.1 Detail of Saint Humility and Scenes from Her Life, Pietro
Lorenzetti, c.1335–40, Uffizi Gallery, Florence.
Figure I3.2 Madonna of the Magnificat, Sandro Botticelli, 1483, Uffizi
Gallery, Florence.
Figure I3.3 Annunciation of Mary with reading tree and multiple books,
Orsini Castle, Bracciano.
Figure I3.4 St. Catherine of Alexandria, workshop of Jan Crocq, c.1475–
1525, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The prevalence of such images in public spaces is particularly significant.

In contrast to illustrations in manuscripts, which would have viewed by
relatively few people (typically of higher social stations), art in churches,
cathedrals, and municipal buildings was available to everyone and explicitly
meant for the edification of those who saw it.74 At popular sites such as
Chartres, St. Denis, Siena, and Canterbury, these images would have been
seen by thousands of pilgrims on a yearly basis and also copied and used for
instruction back home.75 The elaborately inlaid marble floor of the duomo at
Siena, for instance, contains large panels of each of the seven Sybils
(prophetic wise women from each of the ‘known’ geographic realms who
were said to have predicted Christ’s coming) with books and/or scrolls; the
Libyan Sibyl holds a book in one hand and a scroll in the other. (See Figure
I3.5.)

Figure I3.5 The Libyan Sibyl, Guidoccio Cozzarelli, c.1482–3, floor of

Siena Duomo.

It is not, of course, only religious women who are associated with books
in this period: religious men are also frequently shown holding, reading,
and/or writing books. Indeed, the statuary and stained-glass windows in
many Gothic cathedrals depict both men and women holding books, in
parallel poses. The cathedral of St. Denis, for instance, contains a series of
stained-glass windows portraying famous biblical and historical figures,
particularly royalty, with books in their hands, while the cathedral of
Chartres also features a similar series of stained-glass windows. At
Chartres, in fact, it would have been (and still is) impossible to go through
the cathedral’s main entrance without passing through ranks of enormous
statues of crowned men and women, all of whom hold books or scrolls that
herald the coming of Christ (see Figure I3.6). We find men and women
holding books in parallel poses in the remaining statuary at the cathedral of
Reims from this era as well.76 (See Figure I3.7.) Using books to symbolize
the wisdom passed from God to these people and then shared for the
edification of all both reinforces the importance of the written word in
religious life and supports the impression that God shares this wisdom with
women and men alike.

Figure I3.6 The “Royal Portal,” 1150–70, west transept, Chartres

Cathedral.
Figure I3.7 Detail of statuary, c.1225–30, north portal, Reims Cathedral.

Not surprisingly, given the predominance of this imagery and its roots in
the centrality of Scripture in the Abrahamic faiths, books also play an
important role in the visionary literature of many medieval contemplative
women. In her Mirror, for instance, Marguerite d’Oingt writes that she has
taken such care to “write into her heart” the life of Christ that “it sometimes
seemed to her that He was present and that he held a closed book in His hand
in order to teach from it”—an image that would have been deeply familiar to
her readers.77 In the first chapter of the Mirror, Marguerite can see and read
only the outside of this book, which is “completely covered in white, black,
and red letters” with clasps that “had golden letters on them”; as she makes
spiritual progress, however, the book opens and she can see inside, finding
“a delightful place, so large that the entire world seems small by
comparison” illuminated by “a glorious light which divided itself into three
parts, like three persons.”78
The Middle Ages see a dramatic increase in contemplative writing from
the mid-thirteenth century onward, and women were involved in every aspect
of development. In addition to being “avid collectors, readers, and critics of
the vast amount of devotional literature produced in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries,”79 women also authored, recorded, and transmitted
popular and influential texts throughout this period.80 The high demand for
pocket Bibles, books of hours, and meditative literature for personal
devotional use implies that the women who commissioned these works both
could and would read them, and the ‘sister-books’ and convent chronicles
generated by and shared between communities of religious women (for
example, nuns, beguines, and tertiaries) testify to their active participation in
producing such literature.81 If we look at the women presented to them
visually as models of piety, it should come as no surprise that these
visionaries would have felt approval for their activities.

1 As this chapter demonstrates, this holds true both for contemplatives who advocate a more
intellective path towards God (for instance, the Victorines) and for contemplatives known for their
emphasis on love (such as Hadewijch and Julian of Norwich).
2 Boethius’s Consolation remains popular throughout the Middle Ages and is a source of
continuing literary and artistic inspiration. Hrotsvit of Gandersheim draws on the Consolation in several
of her plays (particularly Sapientiae), for example, while Christine de Pizan models the beginning of her
City of Ladies on the beginning of the Consolation.
3 Thomas Aquinas’s intellect-centered and John Duns Scotus’s will-centered accounts become the
foci for this debate, which is sometimes taken to epitomize the difference between Dominican and
Franciscan spirituality. For an overview of the debate, see Tobias Hoffman’s “Intellectualism and
Voluntarism” in the Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, pp. 414–27.
4 We can see that this is a feature of the genre rather than simply the writing style of the authors in
cases where we can compare an author’s scholastic treatises with their less technical works.
Bonaventure and Eckhart are good examples of this: they express the same general ideas quite
differently in their theological writings and their more mystical writings and/or sermons.
5 As Bernard McGinn notes in The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (1300–1500),
Vol.4 of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad
Publishing Co., 2005), “In the course of the fourteenth century, the professionalization of scholastic
theology and its increasing obsession with technical debates concerning epistemology and language had
clearly come to seem counterproductive for believers who sought more than just discourse about God”
(p. 248). For more on the history of scientia in this period, see Robert Pasnau’s “Medieval Social
Epistemology: Scientia for Mere Mortals,” Episteme 7.1 (2010), pp. 23–41.
6 This is what is typically meant when mystics or contemplatives talk about ‘becoming God.’ To
date, Meister Eckhart’s discussions of this have received perhaps the most attention. See, e.g., Ben
Morgan’s On Becoming God: Late Medieval Mysticism and the Modern Western Self (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2013).
7 “A light was given me that I might look upon you / Otherwise it would never have been my
fortune. / There is a Threeness about you / You can indeed be God’s image.” Mechthild of
Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. Frank Tobin (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1998),
p. 81.
8 Flowing Light of the Godhead, p. 82.
9 See, e.g., the dialogue between the Loving Soul and God in their bridal chamber, where “What
happens to her then – [only] she knows – and that is fine with me,” Flowing Light, p. 62.
10 For more this topic in Mechthild particularly, see Sara Poor’s Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her
Book: Gender and the Making of Textual Authority (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2004) and Michelle Voss Roberts’s “Retrieving Humility: Rhetoric, Authority, and Divinization in
Mechtild of Magdeburg,” Feminist Theology 18/1 (2009), pp. 50–73.
11 Flowing Light of the Godhead, II.26, p. 97.
12 “This gift is given from the most High, into whom this creature is carried by the fertility of
understanding, and nothing remains in her own intellect,” ch. 7, p. 85, in Marguerite Porete. The
Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. E. L. Babinsky (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1993).
13 Mirror, ch. 21, p. 104.
14 Mirror, ch. 43, p. 122. This seems an explicit reference to the metaphor of Reason and Love as
the two eyes of the soul, which we also find in Hadewijch (see Section 3.3).
15 All quotations in the remainder of this paragraph are to chapter 53 of Mirror, p. 131.
16 “How dare one say this? I dare not listen to it. I am fainting truly, Lady Soul, in hearing you; my
heart is failing. I have no more life.” All quotes from chapter 87 of Mirror, p. 163. The language of
inheritance in Lady Soul’s reply comes from feudal culture; see Joanne Robinson’s Nobility and
Annihilation in Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2001).
17 Mirror, ch. 135, p. 218. One of the reasons Porete is accused of heresy involves her claim that,
at this stage of annihilation, the Soul “does not pray, no more than she did before she was.” Her
explanation that this is because the soul’s union with God is so complete that praying to God would be
God praying to Godself, as she notes in ch. 136, did not appease her inquisitors.
18 Mirror, ch. 135, p. 218.
19 For further similarities in their thought and other points of Porete’s influence, see the relevant
essays in Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics: Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechthild of
Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete, ed. B. McGinn (New York: Continuum, 1994).
20 Sermon 76 in Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, ed. B McGinn, trans. McGinn, F. Tobin,
and E. Borgstadt (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1986), pp. 327–8.
21 Sermon 70 in The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, trans. Maurice Walshe (New
York: Crossroads Publishing Co., 2010).
22 The Cloud of Unknowing: with the Book of Privy Counselling, trans. Carmen Acevedo
Butcher (Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 2009), ch. 64, p. 144.
23 Cloud, ch. 8, pp. 28–9.
24 The Book of Privy Counselling, ch. 8, p. 193.
25 Summa theologiae Ia 1.1.ad2.
26 This work, also known as the Benjamin minor, is also loosely paraphrased in English in the
fourteenth century as The Pursuit of Wisdom.
 27 Richard of St. Victor, ch. II, p. 54.
28 Richard of St. Victor, ch. IV, p. 57.
29 Richard of St. Victor, ch. LXXIV, p. 131. Richard also reiterates the role of self-knowledge in
reaching the apex of unitive contemplation: “Do you now see how much the ascent of this mountain is
effective, how useful full knowledge of self is?” (ch. LXXVIII, p. 136).
30 For further discussion of Aquinas’s conception of our final end, see my “Aquinas’s Shiny Happy
People: Perfect Happiness and the Limits of Human Nature,” in Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of
Religion Vol. 6, ed. J. Kvanvig (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 269–91.
31 Reason, Rectitude, and Justice each take on different roles in constructing the city: Reason’s
primary role is to help Christine clear away the ground and lay the foundations of the city, while
Rectitude helps her construct the walls, and Justice helps build the turrets and fortifications.
32 Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Richards (New York: Persea
Books, 1982, rev. 1998), p. 9.
33 See, e.g., his Commentary on Ecclesiastes 1.
34 Hadewijch: The Complete Works. ed. and trans. Mother Columba Hart (Mahwah: Paulist
Press, 1980), p. 280.
35 Hadewijch, Letter 18, p. 86.
36 Hadewijch, Letter 10, p. 68.
37 For more on her use of this genre, and its influence on other contemplatives, see Barbara
Newman’s From Virile Woman to Woman Christ: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature.
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).
38 Hadewijch, Poem 30: “Love and Reason,” p. 215.
39 Hadewijch, Poem 25: “Reason, Pleasure, and Desire,” pp. 198–9.
40 Hadewijch, Vision 9, pp. 285–6.
41 Hadewijch, Vision 12, p. 295. Wisdom is also present in this vision, “familiar with all the power of
every perfect virtue that must be encountered in order to content the Beloved perfectly. Wisdom
showed that she also had profound knowledge of each Person of the Trinity in Unity.”
42 Dialogue, ch. 85, pp. 157–8.
43 “For discernment and charity are engrafted together and planted in the soil of that true humility
which is born of self-knowledge.” Dialogue, ch. 9, p. 41.
44 Dialogue, Prologue, p. 26.
45 Dialogue, ch. 51, p. 103.
46 See, e.g., De trinitate, Book XV, chs 20–14.
47 Showings, ch. 55, p. 151. Julian is perhaps drawing explicitly on Catherine’s Dialogue here, as it
was translated into English (as the Orchard of Sion).
48 Not surprisingly, given his conception of our ultimate end, Aquinas’s influential account of faith
portrays it as a primarily intellective (rather than volitional) virtue. See, e.g., Summa theologiae IIaIIae
1, particularly 1.1.
49 This tendency is not universal, though. Eckhart also stresses the role of Christ’s humanity in
joining us to God, but in a way that requires us to empty ourselves of any individuality: “So, since God
dwells eternally in the ground of the Father, and I in him, one ground and the same Christ, as a single
bearer of my humanity, then this (humanity) is as much mine as his in one substance of eternal being, so
that the being of both, body and soul, attain perfection in one Christ, as one God, one Son” (Sermon 70,
quoted in McGinn’s Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism, pp. 359–60).
50 Hadewijch, Letter 6, p. 59. See also Vision 7.
51 Dialogue, ch. 44, p. 90.
52 Dialogue, ch. 26, p. 65.
53 Showings, ch. 58. Julian’s late-fourteenth-century depiction of Jesus as mother is part of
medieval tradition that can also be found in the works of Bernard of Clairvaux and Marguerite d’Oingt
(see, e.g., Marguerite’s description of the crucifixion as Christ giving birth to the world in Section 3.2).
Caroline Walker Bynum’s groundbreaking and exhaustive study of this topic remains a classic: “Jesus as
Mother” in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1982).
54 It is also offered to the reader as the work of an “unlettered” creature whose wisdom comes
directly from God. For more on the connection between love, wisdom, and authority, see Section 3.4; for
use of humility formulae by women in this period, see Interlude 5.
55 Gertrude of Helfta: The Herald of Divine Love, trans. and ed. Margaret Winkworth (Mahwah:
Paulist Press, 1993), ch. 10, p. 110.
56 Memorial IX, p. 214.
57 “When I return to myself after perceiving these divine secrets, I can say some words with
security about them, but then I speak entirely from outside the experience, and say words that come
nowhere near describing the divine workings that are produced in my soul. My statements about them
ruin the reality they represent.” Memorial IX, p. 214.
58 Memorial IX, p. 215.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid.
61 Not to be confused with the similarly named Christina Ebner, Margaret Ebner is remembered
today primarily for her correspondences with Henry Nördlingen and Johannes Tauler, leaders of the
Friends of God movement.
62 Margaret Ebner: Major Works, trans. and ed. Leonard Hindsley (Mahwah: Paulist Press,
1993), p.100.
63 It’s unclear from the text whether Margaret is referring here to the inner or the outer senses—
about which see Patricia Dailey’s “The Body and Its Senses,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Christian Mysticism, ed. A. Hollywood and P. Dailey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012),
pp. 264–76—but the restoration of either (or both) is quite different from the total annihilation that
Porete counsels.
64 Margaret Ebner, p. 155.
65 See, e.g., De Trinitate XII chs 14–15.
66 For more about the development of scientia in this period, see Robert Pasnau’s “Medieval Social
Epistemology: Scientia for Mere Mortals,” Episteme 7/1 (2010), pp. 23–41.
67 See Herbert Grundmann’s groundbreaking 1935 study, translated from the German and published
as Religious Movements in the Middle Ages: The Historical Links between Heresy, the Mendicant
Orders, and the Women’s Religious Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Century, with the
Historical Foundations of German Mysticism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
1995); Bernard McGinn’s The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism—
1200–1350. Vol. III of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New
York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1998); and Caroline Walker Bynum’s Fragmentation and
Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone
Books, 1992).
68 Mirror, ch. 135, p. 218
69 See Barbara Newman’s “Sapientia: the Goddess Incarnate,” in God and the Goddesses: Vision,
Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp.
190–244, for a detailed discussion of this dual identification, particularly in the works on Henry Suso and
Julian of Norwich.
70 The Imitation of Christ, trans. William C. Creasy (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 2017),
Book 1, ch. 3, p. 28.
71 Flowing Light of the Godhead, Book II, pp. 97–8.
72 See Barbara Newman’s “Sapientia: the Goddess Incarnate,” in God and the Goddesses: Vision,
Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp.
190–244.
73 As Richard Kieckhefer comments in his “Holiness and the Culture of Devotion: Remarks on
Some Late Medieval Male Saints”: “We know that devotional reading figured prominently in the urban
religious culture of the era. Paul Saenger has shown, however, that in the late Middle Ages reading was
increasingly associated with inward piety, of a sort that we see most often in women’s vitae. This is not
to suggest that pious women read more than men did, or that the content of the books was less
important for men than for women. Rather, it may be that the activity of reading was in closer accord
with the central themes of women’s piety than with those of men’s, and perhaps for that reason the
men’s biographers pass over the matter in silence.” In Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed.
R. Blumenfeld-Kosinski and T. Szell (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 302.
74 A visit to surviving cathedrals from thirteenth-fifteenth centuries and museums which contain
medieval religious artifacts provides rich illustration of how this worked: the statuary, the figures in
stained glass windows, the altarpieces, and the vestments of the priests elaborately embroidered with
Biblical stories on their backs (the part which would have been facing the congregants during the
celebration of the Eucharist) all share a common visual rhetoric meant to instruct their viewers about the
do’s and don’t’s of piety.
75 The extensive decoration of cathedrals with human figures in this period is a distinct departure
from the earlier Middles Ages, during which, as Sara Lipton notes in Dark Mirror: The Medieval
Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography (New York City: Metropolitan Books, 2014): “for various reasons
(including the relative scarcity of surplus wealth; unease about depicting divinity spurred by still powerful
memories of antique paganism, the debate over icon worship raging in the Byzantine Empire, and
Muslim hostility to divine images; loss of technical expertise; and the ascendancy of nonrepresentational
Germanic and Celtic artistic traditions), art was only fitfully and hesitantly enlisted as a way to
experience God. This situation changed radically in the high Middle Ages” p. 6.
76 For detailed discussion of the development and significance of the figures at Chartres and Reims,
see Jacqueline Jung’s Eloquent Bodies: Movement, Expression, and the Human Figure in Gothic
Sculpture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020).
 77 Marguerite of Oingt, pp. 41–2.
78 Marguerite of Oingt, pp. 43–4. For more on the significance of these images, see Sergi Sancho
Filba’s “Colors and Books in Marguerite d’Oingt’s Speculum. Images for Meditation and Vision,” in
Commitments to Medieval Mysticism within Contemporary Contexts (Bibliotheca Ephemeridum
Theologicarum Lovaniensium, Peeters, 2017), 255–71.
79 David Bornstein, “Women and Religion in Late Medieval Italy: History and Historiography,” in
Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. D Bornstein and R. Rusconi, trans.
Margery Schneider (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 4.
80 See Vols 3 through 5 of Bernard McGinn’s compendious The Presence of God: A History of
Western Christian Mysticism: namely, Vol. 3: The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the
New Mysticism—1200–1350 (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1998); Vol. 4: The Harvest of
Mysticism in Medieval Germany (1300–1500) (2005); and Vol. 5:Varieties of Vernacular
Mysticism: 1350–1550 (2016).
81 See Anne Winston-Allen’s Convent Chronicles: Women Writing about Women and Reform in
the Late Middle Ages. (University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); for a discussion
of women’s writing before the thirteenth century, see Diane Watt’s Women, Writing, and Religion in
England and Beyond, 650–1100. Studies in Early Medieval History. (London: Bloomsbury Academic,
2019).
 4
Love and the Will

The French contemplative Marguerite Porete (d.1310) begins her Mirror of

Simple Souls with a cautionary poem:
You who would read this book,
If you indeed wish to grasp it,
Think about what you say,
For it is very difficult to comprehend.
 Humility, who is keeper of the treasury of Knowledge
 And the mother of the other Virtues
 Must overtake you.
Theologians and other clerks,
You will not have the intellect for it,
No matter how brilliant your abilities,
If you do not proceed humbly.
And may Love and Faith, together,
Cause you to rise above Reason,
[Since] they are the ladies of the house.
  …
Humble, then, your wisdom
Which is based on Reason,
And place all your fidelity
In those things which are given
By Love, illuminated through Faith.
And thus you will understand this book
Which makes the Soul live by love.1

Porete’s warning is aimed at those who rely too much on reason and their
own intellectual abilities. As we saw in Chapter 3, reason’s proper object is
truth, but human beings are not capable of reaching the highest forms of either
truth or contemplation on our own—not that this stops most of us from trying.
Porete’s own position is extreme (see Sections 2.3, 3.2, and 6.2 for more
about her views), but in calling us to turn our attention towards the will and
love, she gives voice to a central theme in later medieval texts: the power of
love and the importance of directing the will towards loving union with God.
If reason’s downfall is arrogance, however, then the will’s downfall is
misdirected love—loving the wrong things, or loving the right things in the
wrong way. The primary question in many contemplative texts from the
thirteenth to fifteenth centuries thus becomes: ‘How can we love the right
things in the right way?’ In this chapter I begin to address that question in
Section 4.1 by laying out medieval views on the general role of the will and
love (understood as the will’s desire for the good), with particular attention
paid to our imaginative and sensory faculties. As I discuss in Section 4.2,
meditations on the life of Christ, the most popular devotional literature of the
mid-thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, specifically encourage engaging
imagination and sense appetite in order to kindle love for God and to
develop virtue. As we see in Section 4.3, meditation is also understood as
leading directly to contemplation, the highest activity of which the human
soul is capable and an activity in which love is placed more highly in later
than in earlier medieval thought. In this way, the meditation genre provides a
particularly good example of how philosophy (both scholastic and
contemplative) impacts moral and spiritual practices in the Middle Ages, for
the reasons given for the use of imaginative meditation draw on
philosophical theories about human nature.
In Section 4.4 I discuss one of the more interesting and important side
effects of the late-medieval emphasis on meditation and love: the space it
opens for women’s voices to be taken seriously on topics of religious
significance. Insofar as meditation is a spiritual exercise aimed at generating
affective attitudes and shaping the will’s love towards its proper object, it
was seen as a form of devotion particularly well suited to women, who were
viewed as generally more sensitive to sensory and emotional stimuli—and
better at loving—than men. At the same time, the portrayal of contemplation
as the highest form of both meditation and cognition means that women were
understood as gaining access to philosophical and theological truths as they
progressed in meditation. As love becomes increasingly portrayed in the
later Middle Ages as the central means to our final end, the widespread
popularity of imaginative meditations opens up space for women’s claims to
knowledge to be accepted because of (rather than despite) their association
with the body.

4.1 The Will in Context

Throughout the Middle Ages there was general agreement both that human
beings are rational animals and that we are created in God’s image (imago
Dei). Insofar as we are animals, human beings are embodied creatures with
nutritive and sensory capacities: we can take in nutrition and grow, sense the
world around us, move towards things we want, and move away from things
we fear. Insofar as we are rational animals, we have a set of capacities that
separate us from other animals: we can think about the nature of the things we
want and fear, make judgments about which ones are ‘true’ or ‘good,’ desire
things under those abstract descriptions, imagine how things could be
different, remember how things used to be, exercise creativity, etc. It is that
set of capacities that connects us to immaterial beings and, in particular, to
God. To ‘image’ God is to be a person possessing intellect and will. (For
more on the medieval conception of ‘person,’ see Chapter 5.) As Thomas
Aquinas writes at the beginning of his Treatise on Happiness, “What it
means for us to be an image [of God] is that we are intellectual creatures
endowed with free choice and capable of controlling our own acts.”2
As we saw in Chapter 3, intellect is aimed at truth, knowledge, and
wisdom. The will, in contrast, desires the good as good (as opposed to being
drawn to it simply because of its scent, appearance, etc.). In the words of the
anonymous fourteenth-century Cloud of Unknowing, “Will is the power that
helps us choose the good that has been selected by reason.” The will is also
the faculty by which we love—sometimes the wrong things in the wrong way,
sometimes the right things in the wrong way, and ideally the right things in the
right way. As the Cloud continues, the will “also helps us love and desire
this good and rest in God, completely confident and joyful.”3 Most things we
desire as good are illusory or transient: sourdough starters were all the rage
during the early pandemic lockdowns of 2020, for instance, but most people
lost interest in making bread after a while and eventually they either threw
out their starter or left it to languish in the back of the fridge. The only object
which can perfectly and everlastingly fulfill our all desires is the summum
bonum or Highest Good—namely, God.
Human action is the result of intellect and will working together: intellect
presents various options to the will as good, the will chooses one of those
options, and its choice moves us to towards action. If I’m deciding what to
spend my afternoon doing, for instance, I usually consider various options
(e.g., napping, finishing an overdue book review, or having coffee with a
friend who’s just texted me), and then make judgments about the wisdom of
those options (I got plenty of sleep last night, I’ve been working all morning
on the book review without getting anywhere, and I could really use some
coffee and time with this friend). My will considers these judgments and
chooses one as the best good in this situation (in this case, having coffee with
my friend), at which point I’m motivated to text her back with an enthusiastic
‘yes, please!,’ put my shoes on, and head out the door. Without the intellect’s
judgments, I would have no options to choose from; without the will’s desire,
I would have no internal motivation to make a choice or do anything about
turning that choice into action.4
If this were a book on scholastic philosophy, the rest of this chapter
would probably address metaphysical intricacies regarding free choice of the
will and/or the primacy of intellect vs. will, because these were popular
subjects of debate in universities (particularly those at Paris and Oxford)
throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.5 Contemplative texts from
this same period focus primarily on the moral and theological import of the
will, however, and so will I. As Johannes Tauler notes in a sermon, “The
great clerics and masters of learning dispute over whether knowledge or love
is greater or nobler. But we want to speak here about the masters of living
[lebmeistern].”6 This focus on living well motivates much of the late
medieval contemplative emphasis on love, for there was a common medieval
assumption that our ultimate end involves some form of everlasting union
with God, and the unitive power of the will—the way it seeks to be one with
the object of its desire—is increasingly portrayed as the best and highest way
of reaching that end. In the words of the fifteenth-century Marsilio Ficino:
“Love unites the mind with divinity much more rapidly, more closely, and
more steadfastly than knowledge does, precisely because the power of
knowledge consists more in distinction, the power of love in union.”7 As we
saw in Section 3.5, the later Middle Ages witnesses a widespread
disillusionment with scholastic distinctions, the power of formal
argumentation, and the knowledge it yields. As Thomas à Kempis writes in
his enormously influential fourteenth-century De Imitatione Christi, “When
the day of judgment comes we shall not be asked what we have read but what
we have done, not how well we have spoken but how well we have lived.…
That person is truly great who has great love.”8
This practical interest leads contemplatives to stress not just the
importance of intellect and will but also that of the senses and imagination,
since our environment and our reactions to our environment are crucial to our
moral and spiritual lives.9 The scenario sketched above, for instance,
required drawing on these capacities in various ways: I used them in
remembering that I slept well last night, for instance, and in feeling the
sensory ‘call’ of caffeine and companionship. In the remainder of this
section, I look more closely at the general work imagination and sensation
play in our moral and spiritual formation before turning to the specific work
they are given in the devotional practice of imaginative meditation.

4.1.1 Sensation and sense appetite

Human love is best stirred up by tangible objects, as Augustine famously

noted in the fourth century, and as Bonaventure acknowledges in the Mystical
Vine when Christ says to him, “I became human and visible so that you might
see Me and so love Me, since, unseen and invisible in my divinity, I had not
been properly loved.”10 The idea that Christ’s incarnation occurs at least in
part as an effort to connect our flesh-and-blood humanity more closely to
God’s divinity—both epistemologically and metaphysically—is common in
medieval contemplative texts. Catherine of Siena provides an extended
metaphor of Christ as bridge between human beings and the divine in her
Dialogue, for instance, while Julian of Norwich writes in her Showings that,
“When God knitted Christ’s body to ours inside the womb of the maiden, he
took on our sensual [i.e. sensory] soul. In taking on our soul, he enclosed us
all within himself, joining our earthly nature to our spiritual essence.”11
The question of how best to use our physical faculties to know and love
God better is a question of central interest in the twelfth through fifteenth
centuries. As we saw in Section 3.1, Richard of St. Victor uses the analogy
of Leah and Rachel (the two wives of Jacob, progenitor of the founders of the
twelve tribes of Israel) to illustrate the rational faculties of the will and
reason, respectively. Leah’s and Rachel’s children are each given analogical
meanings that correspond to their mothers: all seven of Leah’s children are
virtues, while Rachel’s two children (Joseph and Benjamin) stand for
practical wisdom and contemplation. Yet, as anyone familiar with the story
knows, Rachel and Leah also have handmaids (Bala and Zelpha)—
handmaids identified by Richard in his analogy as imagination and
sensualitas. (The term sensualitas defies easy translation into modern
English, in part because it possesses both a broad and a narrow sense; in
what follows, I’ll render it as ‘sense appetite’ when the more narrow sense
is clearly in play, but will use ‘sensation’ when the word is being used in a
more broad sense, and will retain ‘sensuality’ in quotations of texts which
render it this way.)12
It is difficult today not be distracted by the chillingly misogynist aspects
of this story (so brilliantly captured by Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s
Tale), but the idea of imagination and the sensory powers/sense appetite as
indispensable assistants to reason and the will plays a significant part in
medieval contemplative discussions from the twelfth century onward.13 In
Richard’s words, “without imagination, reason would know nothing; without
sensation [sensualitas], affection would have sense of nothing.”14 On even
the medieval views of cognition that argue for innate ideas and/or divine
illumination of universal concepts, human beings are not seen as possessing
innate knowledge of particulars, such as which plants are edible or how to
tell a dog from a cat. To acquire this sort of knowledge, human beings need
to have a variety of sensory experiences of the material world, experiences
which are processed first by the appropriate ‘apprehensive’ faculties (sight,
hearing, smell, taste, touch, and the ‘common sense’ that synthesizes the data
from the individual senses) and then the ‘appetitive’ sensory power.
Medieval views about this process are extremely complex;15 for our
purposes, it’s enough to know that ‘sensation’ is a term that broadly denotes
the work of our sensory capacities, and that those capacities include the
‘sense appetite,’ whose general purpose is to be drawn on a sensory level
towards what’s good for us. The Cloud of Unknowing describes sensation as
“the power that affects and controls our body’s perceptions.” Its job is to pull
us towards physical objects that are good for us and to push us away from
things that are bad for us, allowing us to “know and experience all of
physical creation, both pleasant and unpleasant.”16 Sense appetite is also
frequently divided into the ‘irascible’ (fight-or-flight, protection-oriented)
appetite and the ‘concupiscible’ (pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding) appetite.
My inclination to hit the person who grabs my arm from behind when I’m
walking down a dark street, for instance, comes from my irascible appetite’s
urge to defend myself from harm; my inclination to smile at babies so they
smile back at me comes from my concupiscible appetite’s urge to experience
pleasant things. Furthermore, as Richard of St. Victor’s handmaid analogy
implies, our sensory appetite is both responsive to and ‘serves’ the rational
faculties by priming us to react to various stimuli, making us aware of
potential dangers and pleasures; reason and will then work together in
determining and choosing the best response. If I know a friend is planning to
catch up with me as I walk to the coffee shop, for instance, I might restrain
the urge to hit the person who’s just grabbed my arm until I see who it is. Or
if I’m in a foreign country and unsure of what the social norms are about
interacting with other people’s children, I might wait to smile and wave at a
stranger’s baby until I see someone else do so. In both cases, in determining
what to do, reason and will must react to the various sensory inputs, such as
the rush of adrenaline I feel when my arm is grabbed and the body language
of the chubby-cheeked child’s mother.
Because the will is also understood as an appetite in medieval
discussions—Aquinas, for instance, calls it a “rational appetite for the
good”—the sensory power is particularly linked with the will and the
development of virtue in the contemplative tradition.17 Sense appetite is in
itself morally neutral in this tradition: although its original function was to
help us develop and enact virtue, in the broken world in which we live
virtues are difficult to develop in large part precisely because the forbidden
kiss is so very appealing, and the delayed flight so very frustrating. As The
Cloud of Unknowing describes the situation, “Before sin, our sensuality was
so obedient to the will—as its servant—that it never led the will down the
wrong path.”18 Now, however, we are in the situation where sense appetite
goes easily astray, often pulling the will with it: sense appetite “complains
when the body lacks what it needs, but it also makes us eat excessively and
indulge our other appetites unhealthily.” We can no longer simply follow the
urges of our sense appetite for our wills to desire what is actually (as
opposed to merely apparently) good for us: we need to develop self-control
and what we today call will power.
The relationship between our sensory appetite and our rational appetite is
thus crucial in the formation and exercise of virtue. Our reactions to the
world of sights, smells, and sounds around us can be used to motivate, gauge,
and enact moral virtues and spiritual progress—undoubtedly one of the
reasons Catherine of Siena offers such a variety of sensory metaphors (often
food-related) in her Dialogue. As she remarks in chapter 51, “Sensation is a
servant, and it has been appointed to serve the soul, so that your body may be
your instrument for proving and exercising virtue.”19 My will needs to
respond to the impetus provided to it by sensation predictably and
appropriately in order to be considered virtuous—indeed, according to many
contemplatives, it cannot develop that virtuous inclination in the first place
without such sensory inputs.20 If my sense appetite perceives an adorable
baby and is drawn towards giving it enthusiastic cuddles, then my letting
someone else who also loves babies snuggle the child instead is an act of
generosity that would not be possible without either the initial pull towards
the baby or my will’s subsequent choice to forego the delight so that someone
else can experience it. In the same way, I can only enact the virtue of patience
in the face of provoking situations, like a delayed flight or a perennially late
friend texting me to say she’s finally on the way when I’ve already been
waiting for half an hour: I am not being patient when I am simply waiting at
the gate for an on-time departure or hanging out at the coffee shop before my
friend is scheduled to arrive.

4.1.2 Imagination

As we saw in Chapter 3, while sense appetite is linked primarily to the will,

imagination is linked primarily to the intellect. Imagination’s main role is to
allow reason to call up images (which can be visual, olfactory, auditory, etc.)
which we’ve stored in our memories: it is “the power that helps us form
mental images of anything present or absent.”21 Richard of St. Victor depicts
imagination as busily bringing reason whatever information from the senses
that it might require: “The imagination (insofar as she is a handmaid) runs
between reason and sense. Whatever it imbibes from outside through the
senses of the flesh, it represents inwardly for the service of reason.…Even
when sense fails, imagination does not cease to provide. For when I am
placed in darkness, I see nothing, but if I wish, I can imagine anything.”22
Imagination doesn’t require real-time sensory input—you’ve used it while
reading this chapter already to picture a snuggly baby, for instance, and to
remember the visceral frustration of a delayed flight.
Once we have those mental images in place, reason and imagination work
together to isolate various components, to combine features of experiences in
new and interesting ways, and to draw connections between them.
Bonaventure uses this relation to explain why he includes a diagram in his
Tree of Life. “Since imagination aids understanding, I have arranged in the
form of an imaginary tree the few items I have collected among many,”23 he
says. In the fourteenth-century English allegorical poem Piers Plowman, the
character of ‘Ymaginatif’ plays an important role in helping the central
character (significantly named ‘Will’) negotiate the path between the
physical world and God.24 The ultimate end of imagination is helping the
intellect gain knowledge of abstract, universal truths: “Imagination
participates centrally in the process by which anything is understood in its
fullness.”25 When we’ve experienced enough different sorts of meowing
furry four-footed animals, for instance, and pondered the commonalities and
differences between them, we can form the concept ‘cat’—a concept that is
then modified, corrected, and strengthened by further experiences in the
material world and further work by imagination and reason.
Imagination doesn’t just aid reason in forming concepts and discovering
truths in the world around us, however. It also plays a crucial role in our
moral and spiritual formation. If sense appetite can lead us astray with the
immediate pull of objects in front of us, imagination can lead us astray not
just with images of those same objects later but also with creative and new
combinations of images. We might see an appealing but expensive espresso-
maker in a store, for instance, and walk away from it, only to find ourselves
later imagining it smartening up our kitchen counter while we happily pull
espresso shots for friends and family, getting more and better work done
because of the excellent quality of the caffeine we’re drinking. One click
later on their website and we’ve bought an expensive appliance we don’t
really need. Fortunately, we can also use imagination to help us resist
temptation—perhaps by calling to mind the plethora of coffee-making
devices we already have, or compiling a vivid mental picture of drinking
cappuccino in Siena on the trip we’re saving up for and could go on sooner if
we didn’t indulge now in the espresso-maker.
Medieval contemplative texts stress the importance of training the
imagination to assist us (as opposed to working against us) in attaining our
moral and spiritual goals. As we saw in Chapter 1.3 and Chapter 2.2.3, one
of the most commonly recommended methods for training the imagination in
this way is engaging in imaginative meditation. We cannot simply ‘think’ our
way to God: we must feel a passionate love for God that motivates the
development of virtue in this life and that begins to unite us with the source
of love itself. As we’ll see in what follows, the genre of meditations on the
life of Christ becomes the most popular form of devotional literature in the
thirteenth–fifteenth centuries in large part because it focuses on kindling and
feeding just this sort of fiery love.

4.2 Meditation and the Will

Human beings are physical creatures, and so our path to God must take the
physical world into account; at its most general, the practice of meditation in
the Middle Ages involves using the soul’s faculties to focus our observations
of the external world inward. As Bonaventure writes in The Mind’s Journey
into God, we need to “place our first step in the ascent at the bottom,
presenting to ourselves the whole material world as a mirror through which
we may pass over to God [who has created it].”26 Originally an exercise
designed for cloistered monks and laid out in the twelfth-century Ladder of
Monks and Twelve Meditations (written by Guigo II for the Carthusian
Order), by the end of the thirteenth century meditation had become a popular
spiritual discipline seen as available to anyone. Following Guigo II’s lead,
meditation was typically portrayed and practiced as the second of four linked
exercises: 1) careful focus on passages from Scripture (lectio divina); 2)
meditation (meditatio); 3) prayer (oratio); and 4) contemplation
(contemplatio).27 Lectio divina fills the senses with the sacred words of
Scripture; meditation brings those words to life via imagination’s working
and kindles the fire of love for God; prayer then connects this love directly to
God and works to make the person more receptive to contemplation—which
(as we’ll see in Section 4.3) culminates in the paradoxically receptive
activity of mystical union with God.
An entry point to moral and spiritual transformation, lectio divina can be
practiced in solitude or communally: in medieval religious communities, it
often involved one person reading a scripture passage aloud, slowly and
repeatedly, while others listened intently, focusing on the words or phrases
that caught their attention.28 (In religious communities that discouraged causal
conversations during meals, someone would often read from Scripture or
other holy texts; see Figure 4.1, in which St. Humility is pictured reading to
her sisters while they eat.) In meditation, the words absorbed by lectio
divina are brought to life via imagination’s working with the will and the
intellect. In the Ladder for Monks, for instance, Guigo II describes the
difference between lectio divina and meditation as the difference between
putting food in one’s mouth and chewing it: “Reading, so to speak, puts food
solid in the mouth; meditation chews and breaks it.”29 Clare of Assisi also
uses visual metaphors for this process in her mid-thirteenth-century letters to
Agnes of Prague, counseling Agnes first to gaze at Christ (identified as God’s
Logos or Word) and then to meditate on what she sees, so that she can
eventually contemplate God.30
Figure 4.1 Saint Humility and Scenes from Her Life, Pietro Lorenzetti,
c.1335–40, Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

To kindle greater devotion to God via love for Christ, books of

meditations typically describe events in Christ’s life in vivid detail,
encouraging their reader/hearer to engage imaginatively in those scenes. As
the Meditations on the Life of Christ counsels the Franciscan nun to whom it
is dedicated, “If you wish to profit from all this, Sister, you must place
yourself in the presence of whatever is related as having been said or done
by the Lord Jesus, as if you were hearing it with your own ears and seeing it
with your own eyes, giving it your total mental response: with care, delight,
and sorrow, and with all extraneous cares and concerns set aside for the time
being.”31 The goal is to engage our affective powers: as we ‘watch’ Mary
snuggle her newborn child, for instance, or ‘hear’ the Roman soldier’s whips
hitting Jesus’s back, we experience sensations of love, pain, guilt, etc., that
are meant to inspire compassion, love, and devotion. This stress on
imaginative engagement also has a striking impact on artistic renderings in
this period. The Holy Family (Jesus, Mary, and Joseph), for instance, is often
represented in ‘everyday’ situations that would be relatable to their
audience, such as a baby Jesus clambering over Joseph and pulling his beard
while Mary quietly reads a book. (See Figure 4.2.)
Figure 4.2 The Holy Family, attributed to Lux Maurus, c.1517–27, Musée
de Cluny, Paris.

In her late-thirteenth-century Page of Meditations, Marguerite d’Oingt

evokes a visceral response to Christ’s suffering on the cross by comparing it
with a mother’s suffering in childbirth. Addressing Christ, she writes:
Are you not my mother and more than mother? The mother who bore me labored at my birth for
one day or one night, but you, my sweet and lovely Lord, were in pain for me not just one day,
but you were in labor for more than thirty years. Oh, sweet and lovely Lord, how bitterly were
you in labor for me all through your life! But when the time approached when you had to give
birth, the labor was such that your holy sweat was like drops of blood which poured out of your
body onto the ground.…When the hour of birth came, you were placed on the hard bed of the
cross where you could not move or turn around or stretch your limbs as someone who suffers
much pain should be able to do.…And surely it was no wonder that your veins were broken
when you gave birth to the world all in one day.32

A Carthusian nun who would have been familiar with Guigo II’s Ladder of
Monks and its emphasis on the linked practices of lectio–meditation–
oratio–contemplatio, Marguerite here appeals very intentionally to emotion.
Given that neither hospitals nor privacy were widely available in medieval
Europe, a mother’s pain in childbirth would have been intimately familiar to
her readers (who ranged from fellow Carthusians—both monks and nuns—to
religious and layfolk throughout France).33 The description of Christ as
forced to labor without even being allowed to move around to ease his
suffering makes mentally placing oneself at the scene all the more intense,
and the idea that Jesus is suffering to give birth to us creates a sense of
personal connection to the event.
Marguerite’s Meditation is short and focused entirely on Christ’s
Passion, but longer and more detailed books of meditations cover a whole
range of episodes in the life of both Christ and his mother, Mary. Of these, by
far the most widely read and influential example is the late-thirteenth-century
Meditations on the Life of Christ. Translated into a number of vernaculars,
including Nicholas Love’s influential English The Mirror of the Blessed Life
of Jesus Christ, the Meditations remained popular well into the sixteenth
century; its impact on late medieval culture would be hard to overstate.34
Building on the knowledge of Scripture the reader would have absorbed via
lectio divina, the Meditations—a combination of vignettes from the gospels,
musings on likely events in Christ’s life, and paraphrased sermons from
Bernard of Clairvaux—instructs its readers to imagine what it would have
been like to experience various moments in the life of Mary and Christ with
them. To help with this spiritual exercise, the text explicitly suggests ways in
which readers can (imaginatively) participate. When discussing Lazarus’s
resurrection from the dead, for instance, the text advises: “Take care to focus
your attention as if you were really there to see and hear what happened here.
Feel free to enter into conversation not only with the Lord Jesus and his
disciples, but also with that blessed family so devoted to the Lord and so
loved by the Lord, namely Lazarus, Martha, and Mary.”35
Notably, the reader of the Meditations is encouraged to imagine having
such conversations and to imagine other events in Christ’s life, whether or
not they are explicitly described in Scripture. (This feature is one of the most
important ways in which meditations move beyond lectio divina.36) In the
chapter on the Holy Family’s return from their flight to Egypt, for instance,
the reader is asked to imagine how difficult the trip must have been for Jesus
who, according to tradition, would still have been a small child: “When he
came to Egypt, he was such a tiny thing that he could be carried. Now, he is
just big enough that he cannot be carried very easily and just small enough
that he cannot walk very far.”37 We are asked to imagine that some kind soul
has given Jesus a small donkey to ride, and that we are walking alongside
him. “When he wants to dismount,” the text advises, “Take him joyfully in
your arms, and hold him a bit.” While the Holy Family lives in Egypt,
meanwhile, we are encouraged to imagine Mary making ends meet by
mending clothes, with Jesus helping her by carrying garments back and forth
to their owners.38 (See Figure 4.3.) Going beyond the recorded events of
Scripture in this way was seen as a valuable means of developing a more
personal, deeper love for God. Such engagement was also viewed as an
important component of developing virtue in both the will and the intellect:
our inclination and our ability to care for ourselves and others increase as
our love for God grows.

Figure 4.3 Detail of Meditationes vitae Christi; ms. Ital. 115, Bibliothèque
nationale de France.

The idea that virtue and love help us make cognitive as well as moral and
spiritual progress gains traction in the later thirteenth century and throughout
the fourteenth century. As the prologue to the Meditations states, the person
who meditates frequently “is illuminated by divine virtue in such a way that
she both clothes herself with virtue and distinguishes what is false from what
is true: so much so that there have been many unlettered and simple persons
who have come to know about the great and puzzling truths of God in this
way.”39 Later, the Meditations paraphrases a sermon of Bernard of
Clairvaux to describe how meditating on the life of Christ allows God to
illuminate our intellects: “The feelings, which are influenced by the ever-
changing passions of a corrupt body, can never be tamed, not to mention
cleansed, until the will seeks one goal and moves towards one goal. But
Christ enlightens the intellect; Christ cleanses the feelings.”40 This focus of
the will enables us to handle the constant barrage of information we get from
our senses and their effects on our earthly bodies—effects that impact our
intellects as well as our wills, since disordered desires often negatively
affect our judgments about the good. (In the life to come, our corrupt earthly
bodies will become perfected and incorruptible; for more about embodiment
in the afterlife, see Section 6.3.)
The close relationship between intellect and will is also what ties
meditation to contemplation. The person who hasn’t engaged in extensive
meditation on the fully human (yet fully divine) Second Person of the Trinity
won’t be capable of focusing their attention on contemplation of the higher
truths of the Trinity itself. We embodied creatures need to begin by using
images of the world around us to inspire our attention and love and to work
up to higher levels of contemplation. This is, in fact, the ultimate purpose of
meditation—to “propel your fervor towards higher aspirations.” As the
Meditations continues: “It is fitting that you arrive at greater heights by
traveling this route. Along the way, your affection may be inflamed enough
for you to warm your whole self in it.”41
This progression from imaginative meditation to knowledge of divine
truths is an important part of the shift from the exercise of meditation to that
of contemplation.42 The message of the Meditations is that anyone who
practices this discipline sincerely and consistently—whether ordained clergy
or layperson, male or female—can gain access to the higher truths of God via
contemplation. In Trinitarian fashion, contemplation was often divided into
three levels or stages, with meditation frequently portrayed as the initial
stage.43 “Do not ever believe that you can elevate yourself mentally to the
sublimities of God,” the Meditations warns, “Unless you devote yourself
long and diligently to this [meditation on the life of Christ].”44 As we see in
Section 4.3, the final stage of contemplation transcends anything we are
capable of attaining on our own; it requires God’s grace (frequently depicted
as a ‘gift of love’), for which we can merely make ourselves receptive with
“mighty effort and burning longing.”45 God’s goodness transcends “our
greatest imagination,” writes Julian of Norwich, as well as all thought and
comprehension. When we are truly united with God, “All we can do is
contemplate him and rejoice. We allow ourselves to be filled with the
overwhelming desire for one-ing with our Beloved, to listen deeply for his
call. We delight in his goodness and revel in his love.”46

4.3 Contemplation and Love

“You see then,” the Meditations says, “to what an exalted height meditation
on the life of Christ leads. Like a sturdy platform, it lifts one to greater
heights of contemplation.”47 In this section I address those ‘greater heights,’
which virtually every contemplative tradition (whether ancient, medieval, or
contemporary, monotheistic, polytheistic, or pantheistic) identifies as
unmediated contact with the Divine. As anyone who has loved knows, it is
one thing to love someone from afar and quite a different thing to enter into
the most intimate union possible with that person. This holds particularly true
when the person you’re entering into union with is the ultimate source of
everything in the universe, including love. Medieval contemplatives are
agreed that meditating on Christ’s life and attempting to mirror Christ’s love
for God and neighbor constitute important preparation for contemplative
union, and that attaining this final unitive stage of contemplation depends
entirely on God’s grace. They disagree, however, with respect to the best
means of preparing ourselves, with different views dividing according to the
fault lines separating conceptions of our final end which we have seen
already in Chapters 1–3. The main point of disagreement is whether we
should continue to practice imaginative meditation, or whether we should
seek to transcend meditation and attachment to the material world altogether.
As we saw in Section 4.2, the spiritual practices of lectio divina,
meditation, prayer, and contemplation are understood as intrinsically linked.
Meditation employs sense appetite and imagination to engage with the words
of Scripture, while the primary focus of contemplative prayer (as opposed to
petitionary prayer or prayers of confession) is preparing ourselves for union
with God. As Julian of Norwich puts it, “The whole purpose for praying is to
be made one with the vision and contemplation of the One we long for.”48
One of the central ways in which prayer prepares us for that vision and
contemplation is by seeking to further conform our wills with God’s. When
we are feeling distant from God, Julian counsels, we need to pray “to be
made soft and supple, aligned with the divine will, for the Divine does not
align himself to our will.” As she goes on to observe: “No amount of prayer
will make God conform to us: God is eternally shaped like love.”
The best model human beings have for how to align our wills with God’s
is, of course, the one human being who is also God: Christ. The practice of
imitating Christ thus becomes closely linked to prayer and contemplation in
this period, both as a means of preparing ourselves for union with God and
as a result of such union. In her third letter to Agnes of Prague, for instance,
Clare of Assisi encourages her spiritual sister to place mind, soul, and heart
in God so that she can be transformed via contemplation into an image of
God:
Place your mind before the mirror of eternity!
Place your soul in the brilliance of glory!
Place your heart in the figure of the divine substance!
And transform your whole being into the image of the Godhead Itself
through contemplation!49

Catherine of Siena also begins her Dialogue with an emphasis on the unitive
power of prayer and imitation. “There is no way [one] can so savor and be
enlightened by this truth,” she observes, “As in continual humble prayer,
grounded in the knowledge of herself and of God. For by such prayer the soul
is united with God, following in the footsteps of Christ crucified, and through
desire and affection and the union of love he makes of her another himself.”50
Catherine’s description of God making ‘another himself’ of her (which
appears a number of times throughout the Dialogue) references both the
result of imitating Christ and the Aristotelian idea that the true friend of
virtue is ‘another self.’
Catherine’s description of such prayer as grounded in “the knowledge of
herself and of God” also demonstrates the way in which moving forward via
prayer and contemplation requires self-knowledge. As we saw in Chapter 1,
medieval contemplatives view introspection as essential for moral and
spiritual growth. The recommendation of The Book of Privy Counselling to
“gnaw on the naked blind feeling of our own being,” for instance, is
reinforced in the book’s description of practices vital for reaching higher
stages of contemplation: “There’s nothing else I can do and no other exercise
my mind or body can practice that brings me so close to God and so far from
this world, as does this naked little awareness of my blind being, offered to
God.”51 In fact, the text goes on to identify this self-knowledge as necessary
for contemplation: “The foundation of your contemplation is located in the
clear vision and blind awareness of your very essence.”52 The unifying
power of love is also key here: the more we love God, the more we become
like God and the more likely we are to reach the higher stages of
contemplation that, in Bonaventure’s words, lift us above everything
“sensible, imaginable, and intelligible.”53
Medieval contemplatives disagree, however, about whether, once we
begin to reach those higher stages, we should also continue the practice of
meditation, with its use of the senses, imagination, and natural reason. The
Meditations advises its readers to continue meditating even after progressing
to the ‘greater heights’ of contemplation of God’s essence, for instance, lest
we start to attribute our spiritual growth to ourselves rather than to God’s
grace and thus lose our humility: “Those who strive for greater
contemplation ought never to give up on this kind of meditation, wherever or
whenever it occurs.”54 In Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls, in
contrast, imitation of Christ and even the practice of virtue occupies only the
first three of the seven stages towards our final end; stages four through six
focus on aligning one’s will with God so completely that we fall into an
‘abyss’ of humility such that, when God looks at us, the only thing God sees
is, in fact, God, while the seventh stage is entirely ineffable and attained only
after death.55
The thought that we must leave meditation behind as we progress
spiritually is especially prominent in apophatic texts that stress self-
forgetting and the unknowability of God. The Cloud of Unknowing, for
instance, explicitly advises leaving meditation behind in order to lift one’s
heart with love into the “darkness” of the highest stage of contemplation,
which is described in carefully paradoxical terms as “a blind gazing at the
naked being of God alone.”56 Meditation is important only for the
intermediate stages of spiritual progress, according to the Cloud. While
“without countless sweet meditations on these very subjects—our agony, our
shame, Christ’s Passion, God’s kindness, God’s unfailing goodness, and
God’s worth—the contemplative person won’t advance,” continuing in this
practice after one has become proficient at them becomes counterproductive:
“The man or woman experienced in these meditations must quit them. Put
them down and hold them far under the cloud of forgetting, if you want to
penetrate the cloud of unknowing between you and God.”57 According to this
tradition, only the ‘humble stirring of love’ can unite us with the Divine.
Although it gains a certain popularity in the fourteenth century, the idea
that we must leave meditation behind as we mature spiritually never becomes
the dominant view. Instead, contemplatives often counsel returning to
meditation in order to stay grounded, echoing the juxtaposition of humility
and dignity we saw in Chapter 2 (and will see again in Chapter 5).
Meditation provides the foundation from which we can rise up to the heights
of contemplation; we continue to need that foundation in this life, and so the
contemplative regularly returns to humble meditation. In the final chapter of
The Twelve Patriarchs, Richard of St. Victor uses the analogy of Rachel’s
children (Joseph and Benjamin) embracing in Egypt after many years of
separation to illustrate this process. “What does it mean that Benjamin
descends into Egypt except that the mind’s consideration is called back from
contemplation of eternal things to contemplation of temporal things?”
Richard asks rhetorically, before continuing: “And what does it mean that
Joseph and Benjamin come together and join in kisses except that meditation
and contemplation often run to meet each other with the witness of reason?
For…just as the grace of contemplation is understood by Benjamin, so the
grace of meditation is understood by Joseph.”58 For Richard, the touching
scene of fraternal reunion in Genesis demonstrates how human reason and
divine revelation come together rather than separate in the final stages of
spiritual progress. As he concludes, “In the death of Rachel, contemplation
ascends above reason; in the entry of Benjamin into Egypt, contemplation
descends to the imagination; in the affectionate kissing of Benjamin and
Joseph, human reason gives applause to divine showing.”59
The continued practices of meditation, prayer, and contemplation are also
seen as having a Trinitarian structure which echoes the Augustinian trinity of
the soul as being created in God’s image with understanding, memory, and
will. According to Hadewijch, “God gave us his Nature in the soul, with
three powers whereby to love his Three Persons: with enlightened reason,
the Father; with the memory, the wise Son of God; and with the high flaming
will, the Holy Spirit.”60 As we’ve seen, meditation, prayer, and
contemplation involve all three of these powers in important ways. The
identification of the Three Persons as one God also provides a model in
which fulfillment of one power is naturally linked to the fulfillment of the
others. As Julian of Norwich writes, “Truth sees God. Wisdom contemplates
God. When these two things come together, a third gift arises: the wondrous
delight in God, which is love.” Made in this image, the human soul does best
when it does “what it was made to do: see God, contemplate God, and love
God.”61
On this model, a claim to great love is often simultaneously a claim to
great knowledge. As we will see in Section 4.4, the importance of love for
attaining the highest form of contemplation and love’s integral connection
with wisdom have the unexpected effect of legitimizing medieval women’s
claims to such wisdom, creating space in which they not only speak with
confidence about their experiences of the Divine but what they have to say is
heard—by other women, laypeople, university masters, and the highest
echelons of the Catholic Church.62

4.4 Clear Eyes, Full Hearts: Women’s Bodies and the

Reception of Truth

The portrayal of women in medieval medical texts and popular culture as

less physically and emotionally stable than men was used to justify all sorts
of structural injustices throughout the Middle Ages, including the exclusion of
women from the priesthood and the university system.63 At the same time,
women were believed to be physically and emotionally more sensitive,
better at forming imaginative impressions, and—quite simply—better at
loving than their male counterparts.64 The emergence of meditation as a
spiritual discipline that uses sensory and imaginative powers to fire up the
will’s love for Christ thus made it a natural fit for women’s devotional lives.
As mentioned in Section 4.2, the Meditations is addressed to a Franciscan-
affiliated woman; affective representations of not just Christ’s but also
Mary’s childhood are widespread through the fifteenth century, for Mary was
understood to be a model of both humble love and profound wisdom. The
identification of Mary with wisdom is so strong that she is sometimes
pictured holding a book even at the crucifixion, as in Figure 4.4. (See
Interlude Three for more on reading as a devotional act particularly
associated with women in the later Middle Ages.) As love becomes seen as
increasingly central not just in meditation but also in contemplation, women
gain epistemic authority by speaking about what Love—that is, God—has
taught them.

Figure 4.4 Detail of Memorial Tablet of Hendrik van Rijn, Johan

Maelwael, c.1363, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

A striking example of this can be found in the late-thirteenth-century

Marguerite d’Oingt’s Page of Meditations. A rare instance of a Carthusian
nun whose writings survive, Marguerite (whose works were widely read and
well respected in both her own time and in following centuries) appears at
first glance to be highly apologetic about her authorship:
 I began to think about and to contemplate the sweetness and goodness which is in Him, and the
great good He had done me and all of humanity [via his Incarnation]. I was so full of these
thoughts that I lost my appetite and my sleep.…I thought that the hearts of men and women are
so flighty that they can hardly ever remain in one place, and because of that I fixed in writing the
thoughts that God had ordered into my heart so that I would not lose them when I removed them
from my heart, and so that I could think them over little by little whenever God would give me
His grace. And for that reason, I ask all those who read this text not to think badly [of me]
because I had the presumption to write this, since you must believe that I have no sense or
learning with which I would know how to take these things from my heart,65 nor could I write
this down without any other model than the grace of God which is working within me.66

To read this passage as it would have originally been understood, however,

we need to note three things. First Marguerite, who is proficient in several
languages, obviously does not lack either ‘sense or learning’; in fact, she
writes these words in Latin—the language of scholarship and the church—
and in the meditations genre discussed in Section 4.2. (For more on medieval
women’s use of humility topoi, see Interlude Five.) Second, the Carthusian
order, which took strict vows of silence and solitude, had as one of its
central spiritual metaphors the image of God inscribing words directly into
the human heart, and portrayed the act of writing and transcribing as an
important spiritual discipline.67 Thus, Marguerite’s claim that God ordered
these thoughts “into her heart” and that she is in turn transcribing those
thoughts directly from her heart is extremely significant. Third, Marguerite
attributes her ability to compose this text to nothing less than the model of
God’s own grace moving within her, giving both the origin and the means of
her writing a divine source. Although she initially frames the composition of
this text in terms of an aid to her own future meditation, she assumes a wider
readership in asking for kindness from “all those who read this text.” Taken
as a whole, then, this statement actually positions what Marguerite is about to
say as an important contribution to the teachings of her religious order—and
it is a contribution she attributes entirely to love: “Who gave me the audacity
to speak of such marvelous things if not you who are the true God and my
brother and who showed us the greatest love? Oh beautiful sweet Lord, how
great was that love!”68
In a later letter, Marguerite describes how, after being caught up in
mystical contemplation, she has the experience “written in her heart in such a
way that she could think of nothing else.” In fact, she explains that if she had
not “put these things into writing in the same way that our Lord had put them
into her heart,” she would have died or gone mad.69 The words God has
given her must be shared: writing about her revelations thus becomes for
Marguerite “a discipline with which she can negotiate the overpowering
presence of the divine not merely by relieving the pressure of that presence
but also by responding to it creatively.”70 The fourteenth-century Margaret
Ebner reports a similar experience in her Revelations: “I am compelled to
write by the will and the command of God.”71 In fact, she claims that she kept
trying to drag her feet: “I have actually delayed a long time because I could
never write it down.” Yet, when she finally aligns her will with God’s and
writes about her experiences, she finds that her “delight in His holy works of
love was made stronger.” Both women justify their writing by appeal to
God’s will and presence; their descriptions of being overwhelmed by love to
the point where they must write down and share their experiences is a
common one among medieval mystics—particularly women.
The common belief that women loved more and better than their male
counterparts actually stemmed from negative conceptions of women rooted in
Aristotelian and Galenic biology, according to which the paradigm of human
physiology is male and the highest achievement of the human race is
intellective. Because women do not produce the ‘active seed’ from which
other humans are generated, in women the instantiation of human nature was
viewed as incomplete and/or ‘misbegotten’ (mas occasionatus).72 Female
bodies were also thought to be composed of colder and more watery matter
than male bodies; this physical constitution was seen as making women, with
their softer bodies, more impressionable to sensory stimuli and passions and
thus less able to exercise self-control and detachment.73 At the same time,
women were viewed as having the same general makeup as men, both
mentally and physically, and the active and enthusiastic participation of
women in virtually every aspect of medieval religious life from the thirteenth
to the early fifteenth centuries is one of the most striking features of this
period. Forms of religious expression and practices of piety vary over time
and across geographical regions, of course, but the virtual explosion of
beguine communities through Western Europe in the thirteenth century means
that vast numbers of women were suddenly devoted to the religious life. (For
more on the beguines, see Interlude Two.)
Furthermore, many of these women could both read and write—some
because they came from noble families and had been educated to manage (or,
in a pinch, rule) large households (or, in a pinch, city-states and countries),
and some because their fellow beguines taught them. As I discuss in Interlude
Three, the activity of reading was widely associated with holiness and
religious devotion for women in the thirteenth–fifteenth centuries, and so
women in this period are often depicted holding and/or reading books.74 (See
Figure 4.5.) Small wonder, then, that women make the most of the thin edge
of the wedge constituted by this broad cultural focus on love. Hadewijch,
Mechthild of Magdeburg, Mechthild of Hackeborn, Gertrude of Helfta, and
Marguerite of Porete, for instance, all incorporate elements from secular
love songs and poetry into their religious texts, in addition to drawing
extensively on the Song of Songs commentary tradition popularized by
Bernard of Clairvaux. (See Interlude Four for more on the resulting genre of
‘minnemystik’ or ‘mystique cortoise.’) Women contemplatives speak with
confidence and authority throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
about love, the self, and God; they both share their own experiences and
advise those less experienced about the trials and delights yet to come.75
Aware that their claim to love is their authority, they use it wisely.76
Figure 4.5 Detail of Virgin of the Rose Garden, Master of the Saint Lucy
Legend, c.1475–80, Detroit Institute of Arts Museum.

The influence of women-authored texts throughout this period testifies to

the fact that women were taken seriously as contemplatives, whose insights
into God (understood to be the only true source of knowledge and truth) made
them authoritative sources on moral and theological matters. Furthermore, as
Chapter 5 demonstrates, these texts impact medieval conceptions not only of
knowledge and love but also of what it is to be a human person.

Interlude Four
 Where Does the Erotic Imagery of Medieval Mystics Come
from?

Anyone who delves into late medieval contemplative literature expecting to

encounter only sober advice for pious living is in for a spicy surprise. In
Book II of Mechthild of Magdeburg’s Flowing Light of the Godhead, for
instance, Lady Soul goes to meet her ‘Fairest of lovers’ in a secret room and
finds a bed prepared. “Take off your clothes,” the Lord tells her. “What will
happen to me then?” asks Lady Soul. The following exchange is heated:
“Lady Soul, you are so utterly formed to my nature
That not the slightest thing can be between you and me.77
…
And so you must cast off from you
Both fear and shame and all external virtues.
Rather, those alone that you carry within yourself
Shall you foster forever.
These are your noble longing
And your boundless desire.
These I shall fulfill forever
With my limitless lavishness.”
“Lord, now I am a naked soul
And you in yourself are a well-adorned God.
Our shared lot is eternal life without death.”
Then a blessed stillness
That both desire comes over them.
He surrenders himself to her,
And she surrenders herself to him.
What happens to her then – she knows.
And that is fine with me.
But this cannot last long.
When two lovers met secretly,
They must often part from one another inseparably.78

Mechthild’s depiction of the secret love-making of Lady Soul and her Lord
conjures up images of knights and ladies, castles, quests, and—of course—
passion. Whether referred to as ‘courtly love’ (a label now controversial in
academic circles because it was applied retroactively to the tradition, rather
than being how the originators of the tradition described themselves) or
fin’amor, love reigns supreme in the Middle Ages. And this love is not a
quiet affection—it is a scorching fire that overwhelms all else and drives
men and women to sacrifice everything for its sake. The medieval sagas of
both Tristan and Iseult and Lancelot and Guinevere, for instance, contain
sections in which their love-frustrated heroes go mad and live like animals in
the forest for a time. Elaine, ‘the Fair Maid of Astolat,’ not only pines for
Lancelot but eventually dies from her unrequited love, while Merlin becomes
so enamored of Nimue that he allows her to imprison him in an oak tree, even
knowing in advance what his fate will be.
Love’s supremacy—both the fall of the wise and mighty to its power and
its tendency to upend priorities—is a common subject in secular poetry,
stories, and art of the thirteenth century and beyond.79 The great philosopher
Aristotle (whose works had been translated into Latin at the outset of the
thirteenth century and become the subject of great controversy) joins Merlin,
for instance, in being made a fool by love in another medieval tale. While
tutoring Alexander the Great, the story goes, Aristotle becomes frustrated by
Alexander’s passion for his wife distracting him from study and scolds him
for not being stronger-minded. In response, Alexander’s wife, Phyllis (whose
name simply means “Love”), decides to teach Aristotle a lesson. In a short
period of time, she causes Aristotle to burn so hotly for her that when she
says the price of her affections is that he allow her to put a saddle and bridle
on him and ride him around like a pony, he readily agrees. Alexander is in on
the plot, and husband and wife get a good laugh at seeing the preeminent
philosopher brought so low by love. (See Figure I4.1, in which Aristotle
tutors Alexander on the left panel and then is being ridden by Phyllis in the
next panel while Alexander watches from atop the castle.) This story often
appears as a panel in portrayals of ‘Attack on the Castle of Love,’ a popular
subject on ivory caskets and the backs of mirrors. (See Figure I4.2, in which
the winged figure of Love shoots arrows at the knights while ladies throw
down flowers.)
Figure I4.1 Detail of side panel, “Attack on the Castle of Love,” ivory
casket, c.1300–25, Musée de Cluny, Paris.
Figure I4.2 Mirror-case with “Attack on the Castle of Love,” Paris
workshop, c.1320–40, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence.

This interest in love and sex is highly relatable, but it still might seem
surprising to find religious figures dedicated to a life of chastity
enthusiastically discussing burning with passion. Yet medieval mystics and
contemplatives frequently use these tropes to express their experiences and
to encourage others towards moral and spiritual progress. As we’ve seen
throughout this book, the contemplative project is at heart both practical and
universal: its ultimate goal is not theoretical knowledge but lived experience
that culminates in actual union with God, and this goal is recommended for
any and all who are willing to work towards it. Contemplative texts are thus
meant to be accessible and engaging—and what better way to engage a wide
audience than to link your subject matter to topics in which they’re already
interested? When God tells Mechthild’s Soul to get naked, we’re hooked.
Furthermore, in part because their texts are often meant for regular
laypeople as well as the higher-ups of ecclesiastical, university, and
governmental institutions, a number of contemplatives in the thirteenth–
fifteenth centuries write in the emerging vernaculars of their local regions
rather than in Latin, which is increasingly the language of the elite. The use of
the vernacular encourages an emphasis on emotion and love, for “the major
literary genres available in these languages were various kinds of love
poetry and romantic stories: the vocabulary provided by such genres was
therefore a vocabulary of feelings.”80 Hadewijch, for instance, called “the
most important exponent of love mysticism and one of the loftiest figures in
the Western mystical tradition,” uses this vocabulary to portray the soul’s
search for God as a knight’s quest for his Beloved.81 (See Section 3.3 for
examples.) Her poetry is a masterpiece of genre-flipping: she takes the
tropes popularized by French troubadours and trouvères (such as the twelfth-
century Chrétien de Troyes82) and exemplified in the minnesang (literally,
‘love song’) of her own region and recasts them as the soul’s longing for
God. In the process, the masculine knight becomes the feminine-gendered
soul, and the noble lady for whom the knight pines becomes God.83
Hadewijch is hardly alone in this respect: Mechthild of Hackeborn joins
Mechthild of Magdeburg in drawing on elements of fin’amor, while
Marguerite Porete frames her entire Mirror of Simple Souls in terms of the
nobility of love’s quest, describing the soul who has reached the fourth stage
of the journey towards God as “so impenetrable, noble, and delicate that she
cannot suffer any kind of touch except the touch of the pure delight of love, by
which she is singularly joyful and charmed.”84 Catherine of Siena, in turn, is
often portrayed exchanging hearts with God, as medieval lovers would do as
a pledge of devotion. (See Figure I4.3.)
Figure. I4.3 St. Catherine of Siena Exchanging Hearts with Christ,
Guidoccio Cozzarelli, late fifteenth century, Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena.

Finally, the ultimate goal of the contemplative life is an ineffable

experience—it cannot be described in literal, prosaic terms. In this way, it
resembles transcendent moments of sexual union, which also can be
expressed only in metaphor. The way in which medieval Christian mystics
and contemplatives frequently use metaphors of sexual intercourse (a
physical experience they chose to forswear for God’s sake) to express how
love for and experience of God overwhelms them is strikingly similar to the
way in which medieval Islamic mystics and contemplatives use metaphors of
drunkenness (a physical experience they chose to forswear for Allah’s sake)
to express how love for and experience of Allah overwhelms them.85
Mystics in both these traditions use the ecstatic qualities and appeal of sex
and drink to heighten both understanding of and appreciation for the ultimate
experience of God.

1 Marguerite Porete. The Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. E. L. Babinsky (Mahwah: Paulist Press,
1993), p. 79.
2 Preface to Summa theologiae, IaIIae. Aquinas motivates his discussion of morality (the entire
Second Part of Summa theologiae) in terms of our being image-bearers of God: “It remains for us to
investigate God’s image – namely, human beings – insofar as we are the source of our own acts
because we possess free choice and have power over what we do.” Thomas Aquinas, The Treatise on
Happiness: Summa theologiae IaIIae 1–21, trans. Thomas Williams. Hackett Aquinas Series
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 2016), p. 1.
3 The Cloud of Unknowing: with the Book of Privy Counselling, trans. Carmen Acevedo
Butcher (Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 2009), ch. 64, p. 144.
4 This is all terrifically simplified, of course—intellect and will work together at various stages
throughout this process. Figuring out what shoes to put on, for instance, requires their coordination, as
does determining which coffee shop to go to and then how to get there.
5 For an overview of these debates, see Tobias Hoffman’s “Intellectualism and voluntarism,” in The
Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, ed. R. Pasnau and C. Van Dyke (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 414–27.
6 Johannes Tauler, V [Sermon] 45, quoted in McGinn, Harvest, p. 240.
7 Theologia Platonica, Book XIV.10 (4:316–17), as quoted in McGinn, Varieties of Vernacular,
263.
8 Imitation of Christ, trans. William C. Creasy (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 2017), Book 1,
ch. 3, pp. 29–30.
9 This is not to imply in any way that sensation and imagination do not play important roles in the
epistemological frameworks of thirteenth–fifteenth-century scholastics. They receive relatively less
attention than intellect and will, though—a feature which is mirrored in the secondary literature. For
some exceptions to this general rule, see chs 1 through 6 in Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval
and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. M Pickavé and L. Shapiro (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012).
10 Bonaventure, The Works of Bonaventure, Vol. 1: The Journey of the Mind to God, The Triple
Way or Love Enkindled, The Tree of Life, The Mystical Vine, On the Perfection of Life, Addressed
to Sisters, trans. J. de Vinck (Mansfield Centre: Martino Publishing, 2016), p. 204.
11 The Showings of Julian of Norwich, trans. Starr, ch. 57, p. 158.
12 By the fourteenth century, ‘sensualitas’ is regularly rendered in Middle English works as
‘sensuality’: Cloud of Unknowing, Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich’s Showings, etc.
13 See, e.g., Elaine Glanz’s “Richard Rolle’s Imagery in Meditations on the Passion B: A Reflection
of Richard of St. Victor’s Benjamin Minor,” Mystics Quarterly 22/2 (1996), pp. 58–68.
14 The Twelve Patriarchs, ch. V, p. 57.
15 For an overview of the issues and positions, see Dag Hasse’s “The Soul’s Faculties,” in The
Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy (2009), pp. 305–19. For a classic scholastic discussion of
sensualitas as a power of the human soul, see Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae Ia 81.
16 Cloud of Unknowing, ch. 65, p. 147.
17 See, e.g., Aquinas’s Treatise on Happiness, Q 1.2.co.
18 All quotes in this paragraph are from Cloud of Unknowing, ch. 65, p. 147.
19 Dialogue, p. 105. Suzanne Noffke translates sensualità as ‘sensuality,’ which is also how this
term is rendered into Middle English in translations of the Dialogue.
20 For more on the relation between virtue and the will and how it changes during this period, see
Bonnie Kent’s Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century
(Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995).
21 Cloud of Unknowing, ch. 65, p. 145.
22 The Twelve Patriarchs, ch. V, p. 58.
23 Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God; The Tree of Life; the Life of St. Francis, trans.
Ewert Cousins (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1978), p. 120.
24 As Michelle Karnes notes in Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), Ymaginatif helps Will understand how to put his sensory
powers to good use: “What most concerns Langland is how to make the transition from natural
knowledge, the knowledge that the individual attains through the natural faculties of sense and reason, to
what we might call spiritual understanding, that is, understanding created things as they pertain to God”
(p. 180).
25 Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition, p. 180.
26 Bonaventure, Mind’s Journey into God, p. 63.
27 For chapter-length discussions of each of these practices, see the following in The Cambridge
Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. A Hollywood and P. Beckman (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 2012): E. Ann Matter’s “Lectio Divina” (pp. 147–56), Thomas Bestul’s
“Meditatio/Meditation” (pp. 157–66), Rachel Fulton Brown’s “Oratio/Prayer” (pp. 167–77), Charlotte
Radler’s “Actio et Contemplatio/Action and Contemplation” (pp. 211–24), as well as Bernard
McGinn’s “Unio Mystica/Mystical Union” (pp. 200–10).
28 Grace Jantzen captures the connection between lectio divina and love when she writes: “The
mystical meaning of scripture was not held to be something that could be learned while leaving
everything else as it is. It was rather the means whereby one could be soaked in the love of God, so that
that divine love could permeate all thought and activity.” Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 81.
29 He continues to describe prayer and contemplation with the same metaphor: “Prayer attains its
savor/contemplation is itself the sweetness that rejoices and refreshes.” Guigo II, The Ladder of
Monks and Twelve Meditations, trans. Edmund Colledge, OSA, and James Walsh, SJ (Kalamazoo:
Cistercian Publications, 1978), pp. 68–9.
30 See, e.g., Clare’s second letter to Agnes, in Francis and Clare: The Complete Works, trans. R.
Armstrong, and I. C. Brady (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1986), p. 197.
31 D’Oingt, Page of Meditations, p. 4. Here and elsewhere I follow Stallings-Taney’s Latin edition,
translated as Meditations on the Life of Christ by Francis X. Taney, Anne Miller and C. Mary
Stallings-Taney (Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 2000).
 32 The Writings of Margaret of Oingt, Medieval Prioress and Mystic (d. 1310), trans. with an
introduction, essay, and notes by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), p. 31.
Although striking in contemporary contexts, the depiction of Jesus as mother is relatively common in the
thirteenth–fifteenth centuries. For a classic study of this, see Caroline Walker Bynum’s Jesus as
Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984).
33 For more on Marguerite’s use of imagery and readership, see Sergi Sancho Fibra’s “Colors and
Books in Marguerite d’Oingt’s Speculum. Images for Meditation and Vision,” in Commitments to
Medieval Mysticism within Contemporary Contexts. Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum
Lovaniensium (Leuven: Peeters, 2017), 255–71.
34 For the definitive Latin edition, see Meditationes Vitae Christi, ed. Mary Stallings-Taney,
Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis (CCCM 153) (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997).
35 Ch. 66, on Lazarus being raised from the dead, p. 215.
36 As Grace Jantzen writes, “Imaginative meditation was to be encouraged, not cramped by the
literal or historical sense, because it is by imaginative entry into the mystical sense of scripture that the
love and grace of God can be encountered” (Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism, p. 82).
37 Meditations, ch. 13, pp. 50–1.
38 A wonderfully illustrated manuscript of the Meditations (Meditationes vitae Christi; ms. Ital.
115, Bibliothèque nationale de France) is available online at
https://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc9195s. For further discussion, see Holly Flora’s The
Devout Belief of the Imagination. The Paris Meditationes Vitae Christi and Female Franciscan
Spirituality in Trecento Italy. Disciplina Monastica, Vol. 6 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009).
39 Prologue to the Meditations, 3. As I discuss in Section 3.4, the progression from imaginative
meditation to knowledge of divine truths is seen as applying to women as well as men: the Meditations
is itself addressed to a woman and uses female pronouns throughout for the human being. This has led
to speculation that the author of the Meditations might have been a woman (see Sarah McNamer’s
“The Origins of the Meditationes Vitae Christi” in Speculum 84 (2009), pp. 905–55), but most scholars
today agree that its author was likely a Franciscan friar writing to a sister in the same Order. See, e.g.,
Michelle Karnes’s “Exercising the Imagination: The Meditationes vitae Christi and Stimulus amoris”
in Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition; Dávid Falvay and Peter Tóth’s “New Light on the Date
and Authorship of the Meditationes vitae Christi” in Devotional Culture in Late Medieval England
and Europe: Diverse Imaginations of Christ’s Life, eds. Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry (Turnhout:
Brepols, 2015), pp. 17–104; Isa Ragusa’s “L’autore della Meditationes vitae Christi sedondo il codice ms
Ital. 115 della Biblioteque Nationale di Parigi”, in Arte medievale, 11 (1997), 145–50.
40 Meditations, ch. 51, p. 175.
41 Meditations, ch. 107, p. 330.
42 As Michelle Karnes notes, “The most important cognitive task assigned to medieval imagination
was the discovery of truth” (Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition, p. 4).
43 As Mari Hughes-Edwards notes, in this period “contemplation united many restorative, spiritual
activities together and cannot be understood as a signifier for one alone.” Mari Hughes-Edwards,
Reading Medieval Anchoritism: Ideology and Spiritual Practices (Cardiff: University of Wales
Press, 2012), p. 83.
 44 Meditations, ch. 50, p. 172. The Meditations identifies itself as involving a third, ‘imperfect’
form of contemplation focused on the humanity of Christ, while the other two stages of contemplation
(focused respectively on the heavenly court and—ultimately—on God’s essence) remain inaccessible to
us without extensive meditation.
45 Richard of St. Victor, Twelve Patriarchs, ch. LXXIII, p. 131.
46 Showings, ch. 43, pp. 107–8.
47 Meditations, Prologue, p. 3.
48 All quotes from Julian in this paragraph are from Showings, ch. 43, p. 107.
49 Francis and Clare: the Complete Writings, p. 200.
50 Prologue to The Dialogue, trans. Suzanne Noffke, OP (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1980), p. 25.
51 Book of Privy Counselling, ch. 3, p. 179, from Cloud of Unknowing.
52 Book of Privy Counselling, ch. 4, p. 181.
53 The Threefold Way 1.15–17.
54 Meditations, ch. 107, pp. 330–1. The text goes on to assure the reader that Bernard of Clairvaux
(whose sermons make up a substantial portion of the Meditations and is, thus, the most relevant
authority figure to hand) never abandoned the practice of meditation but returned to it regularly as part
of his spiritual practices.
55 For further discussion of these issues that also place Porete’s views in the context of earlier
beguines such as Hadewijch and Mechthild of Magdeburg, see Juan Marin’s “Annihilation and
Deification in Beguine Theology and Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls,” Harvard
Theological Review 103/1 (2010), pp. 89–102.
56 Cloud of Unknowing, p. 28.
57 Cloud of Unknowing, p. 24.
58 Twelve Patriarchs, ch. LXXXVII, p. 146.
59 Twelve Patriarchs, ch. LXXXVII, p. 147. It’s worth noting that the fourteenth-century Middle
English ‘translation’ of this text (The Pursuit of Wisdom, which is more a paraphrase of what the
anonymous author takes to be its central points), does not include this return to imaginative meditation
and human reason but, rather, ends with meditation and prayer finally leading to “the mind being
ravished above itself” in contemplation.
60 Hadewijch: The Complete Works, Letter 22, ed. and trans. Mother Columba Hart, OSB
(Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1980), p. 97.
61 Showings, ch. 44, p. 109.
62 Catherine of Siena, for instance, was not yet 30 years old when she was sent to Avignon in 1376
to intercede with Pope Gregory XI to end the ‘papal exile’ (and the pope’s war with Florence); later, the
pope cites her counsel as one of the reasons he returns to Rome.
63 See Prudence Allen’s The Concept of Woman (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.,
2006) for a detailed history of these arguments—and medieval responses to them.
64 For more on women’s superior claim to loving, see Barbara Newman’s “La mystique courtoise:
Thirteenth Century Beguines and the Art of Love,” in From Virile Woman to Woman Christ: Studies
in Medieval Religion and Literature. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), pp. 137–
67, as well as her ch. 4, “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling,” in God and the Goddesses: Vision,
Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp.
137–89.
65 Alternately translated as “I have in myself neither the understanding nor the clerical office by
which I would know how to draw out these things from my heart,” as rendered by Charles Stang in
“Writing,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, p. 263.
66 The Writings of Margaret of Oingt, Medieval Prioress and Mystic (d. 1310), p. 26.
67 As Bennett Gilbert writes, “Transcription, filling the monk’s mind with truthful words, was the first
step in a [Carthusian’s] spiritual reflection”, in “Early Carthusian Script and Silence,” Cistercian
Studies Quarterly 49/3 (2014), pp. 367–97, p. 372. See also Stephanie Paulsell’s “Writing and Mystical
Experience in Marguerite d’Oingt and Virginia Woolf,” Comparative Literature 44/3 (1991), pp. 249–
67.
68 The Writings of Margaret of Oingt, p. 27.
69 D’Oingt, Letters, pp. 64–5.
70 Stang, “Writing,” The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, p. 263.
71 All quotes from Ebner in this paragraph are from Revelations, in Margaret Ebner: Major
Works, trans. and ed. Leonard Hindsley (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1993), p. 132.
72 Thomas Aquinas’s discussion of the nature of women and women’s bodies in Summa theologiae
Ia 92 presents a standard account of this view. Galenic biology saw women as also producing seed
necessary for generation, but of a lesser sort; on this view, female reproductive systems were
essentially an inverted version of male, and thus there was always the possibility of changing from one
sex to another. This conception of the biological differences between men and women leads to a
fascination with hermaphrodites and spontaneous sex changes throughout the Middle Ages.
73 On the other side of this spectrum were the ‘natural laborers,’ whose bodies were too tough to
take in sense impressions well and who thus weren’t naturally suited for intellective labor or ruling.
Somehow, the pale, softer-but-still-just-firm-enough bodies of upper-class men ended up having the right
constitution for taking on all the most important intellectual, political, and spiritual responsibilities.
Amazingly, the received ‘wisdom’ about these sorts of physiological differences and their effects
continues to ground arguments for natural subjection today.
74 As Richard Kieckhefer notes, “We know that certain women saints were enthusiastic readers,
and we know that devotional reading figured prominently in the urban religious culture of the era.”
“Holiness and the Culture of Devotion,” in Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. R.
Blumenfeld-Kosinski and T. Szell (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 302.
75 The claim that they speak with authority and confidence might seem belied by their frequent use
of self-denigrating language and humility topoi; see Interlude Five for an argument that some women
contemplatives actually use this rhetoric to establish authorial authority.
76 As Barbara Newman writes, “It was an artful knowing, not mere desire, that made them into
those dangerously subtle creatures, beguines clergesses” (“La mystique courtoise”, p. 137).
77 See also Hadewijch: “If two things are to become one, nothing may be between them except the
glue wherewith they are united together. That bond of glue is Love, whereby God and the blessed soul
are united in oneness.” Hadewijch, Letter 16, p. 80.
78 Flowing Light of the Godhead, Book I, p. 62.
79 One of the most famous secular examples of this genre is the Roman de la Rose. The epic poem,
begun in the early thirteenth century by Guillaume de Lorris, was completed by Jean de Meun in the
later 1200s. (For more on its history, see the introduction to The Romance of the Rose, trans. C.
Dahlberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).) In the early fifteenth century, Christine de
Pizan makes a stir with her objections to de Meun’s highly negative portrayal of the nature of women in
a lively correspondence with three members of the French court. The fame Christine garners via this
‘Querelle de la Rose’ is what establishes her as an author and grounds the success of her subsequent
City of Ladies—a book-length defense of the nature and actions of women.
80 Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Female Body and Religious Practice,” in Fragmentation and
Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone
Books, 1992), p. 196.
81 Preface by Paul Mommaers, SJ, in Hadewijch: The Complete Works, xiii.
82 See The Complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes, trans. David Staines (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1990).
83 See Barbara Newman’s “La mystique coutoise: Thirteenth-Century Beguines and the Art of
Love,” in From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).
84 Mirror of Simple Souls, ch. 118, p. 190. For more on Porete’s use of this tradition, see Joanne
Robinson’s Nobility and Annihilation in Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2001).
85 See, for instance, The Wine of Love and Life: Ibn al-Farid’s al-Khamriyah and al-Qaysari’s
Quest for Meaning, ed. and trans. Th. Emil Homerin (Middle East Documentation Center on behalf of
the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Chicago, 2005). Both Islamic and Christian
contemplatives draw on Scripture, particularly the Song of Songs (a sexually explicit love poem which
was understood by medieval Christians as an allegory for Christ’s relation to his bride, understood
simultaneously as the entirety of the Church and as each individual Christian) in their use of these
metaphors.
 5
Persons

The previous three chapters of this book have focused on medieval

contemplative theories about the roles self-knowledge, reason, and the will
play in our moral and spiritual lives. In this chapter I take a step back to look
more closely at views about who “we” are in the first place, for how best to
answer to that question is a topic of much discussion in the thirteenth through
fifteenth centuries, and one that has important implications for expectations
about immortality and the afterlife (the topic of Chapter 6). The prevailing
assumption throughout this period is that “we” (that is, those most involved
in asking and answering these questions) are both human beings and persons.
As we’ve seen, human beings were understood to be rational animals,
composites of physical body and immaterial soul, who live simultaneously in
the world of rocks and trees and in the world of universal concepts and
abstract truths. As animals, we do things like eat, grow, reproduce, and have
sense perception; as intellective beings, we do things like think, hope,
believe, and love. Also, as intellective beings, we are persons.
What precisely it means to be a person is the subject of lively and wide-
ranging debates from antiquity onward: by the end of the twelfth century, the
Latin term ‘persona’ has separate but overlapping uses in a number of
different fields, including grammar, logic, law, politics, and theology.1 In
Section 5.1 I describe these uses, arguing that together they yield a general
understanding of ‘person’ in which individuality, dignity, and rationality are
key. In Section 5.2 I turn to the way in which the concept of persons as
rational individuals who possess intrinsic dignity appears in a wide range of
contemplative texts, including those by Hadewijch, Meister Eckhart,
Catherine of Siena, and Julian of Norwich. In Section 5.3 I discuss how this
concept combines with the contemplative use of first- and second-person
perspectives, personification, and introspection to yield a rich (and perhaps
surprisingly familiar) understanding of what it means to be a person—an
understanding that forms a vital part of who medieval thinkers believe we
are, both in our own right and in connection to God, whose Trinity was held
to be composed of three distinct persons. I conclude the chapter with a brief
overview of how these discussions impact early modern and modern
discussions of persons in ways that have been largely overlooked—
particularly John Locke’s famous seventeenth-century definition and the
development of personalism in the nineteenth century and beyond.

5.1 Putting ‘Person’ in Perspective

We can divide the contexts in which the term ‘persona’ appears into three
general categories: logical/grammatical, legal/political, and
2
metaphysical/theological. In this section I address the use of the term in each
of these contexts, explaining what it contributes to the general understanding
of ‘person’ that contemplatives and scholastics inherit in the thirteenth
century and onward. In logical and grammatical discussions, for instance, the
word ‘person’ is used to indicate a distinct individual, in contrast both to
universal concepts (like ‘justice’) and to qualities common to a number of
different objects (like a color or a shape). In the realm of law and politics,
by contrast, the term ‘person’ is used primarily to distinguish who’s from
what’s (e.g., one’s neighbor from one’s neighbor’s field) for the purposes of
determining rights, duties, and penalties. In metaphysical and theological
discussions, the term appears most often in Christian debates about the nature
of God, for God is held to be three persons in one being, and Christ to be one
person with both a human nature and a divine nature. As we’ll see, the
general understanding of ‘person’ that emerges from these complex and
overlapping discussions is one which stresses individuality, dignity, and
rationality.

5.1.1 Grammatical and logical context

Medieval logical and grammatical discussions use ‘persona’ both to
distinguish constructions with a subject from those without one and to
contrast individuals with classes, species, groups, and universals. In
suppositional theory, for instance, which focuses on the semantic roles of
terms in sentences (including what we now refer to as reference and
meaning), ‘personal’ supposition applies when there is an individual subject
for a grammatical sentence, such as “Hildegard wrote to the bishop,” in
contrast with impersonal supposition, such as “It is true that Hildegard was
an abbess.”3 What is most crucial to the concept of person in both
grammatical and logical contexts is individuality. In fact, the term ‘persona,’
as denoting an individual, is so commonly contrasted with the term
‘populus,’ as denoting a particular group of persons, that in the emerging
English vernacular the plural of ‘person’ eventually becomes ‘people’ rather
than ‘persons’ (a term increasingly reserved for technical discussions,
particularly in theological contexts, as we see in Subsection 5.1.3). The use
of ‘persona’ throughout these discussions yields a grammatical and logical
notion of ‘person’ in which individuality is the most relevant quality.
Another important feature that ‘person’ connotes in these contexts,
however, is incommunicability, which entails a certain sort of uniqueness and
non-repeatability. Universals such as ‘human being’ or ‘green,’ for instance,
are inherently communicable in that they can exist (or, to use more technical
language, ‘be instantiated’) in any number of objects. So, for instance, both
my mother and my sister are human beings, as are the middle-school students
my sister teaches: they all instantiate the universal ‘human being’ at the very
same time. Universals can be instantiated in objects over time as well: the
leaves on the trees outside my window right now are green, and so were the
leaves on the same trees last year (before they turned colors and fell in
autumn). ‘Greenness’ is something many objects can instantiate both at a time
and over time—like ‘humanness,’ it is a ‘communicable’ property that can be
shared by many things. A person, by contrast, is a unique individual who is
intrinsically non-communicable and cannot be shared or held in common
between objects.4 If a person were cloned, for instance, the result would be
two separate persons, not two instantiations of the ‘same’ person.
The incommunicability of persons becomes important in the Middle Ages
primarily for its logical significance in discussions of the Trinity, particularly
attempts to explicate and defend the claim that God is three persons in one
being.5 The incommunicability and inherent individuality of persons also
play an important role in philosophical and theological discussions of the
nature of the rational soul and human cognition. During the Averroistic
controversies in the thirteenth century, for instance, the possibility that there
is one universal ‘agent intellect’ for all human beings (somewhat like a
computer mainframe we all use when cognizing) is often criticized sharply
for not maintaining the individuality and non-fungibility necessary to maintain
our status as individuals with distinct moral and spiritual accountability.6

5.1.2 Legal and political context

Medieval legal and political theory is heavily indebted to Roman law, which
was structured around the relation between persons (personae), things (res),
and events or transactions (actiones). In this context, the term persona
connotes different sorts of roles available to individual agents, such as
spouse, property owner, or defendant.7 This use carries over into medieval
legal theory, in part because of the Herculean efforts of the mid-twelfth-
century Benedictine monk Gratian to preserve and systematize all the legal
codes he had access to as a professor of law at the University of Bologna,
many of which have Roman origins. In his massive Decretum, also referred
to as the Decretum Gratiani, Gratian not only records but also synthesizes
and resolves apparent disagreements between the roughly 3,800 texts he has
compiled, using an early version of the disputed question genre (in which a
teacher or ‘master’ examines apparently opposing views on a particular
question and then ‘settles the question’ by providing a resolution that draws
on recognized authorities, such as Augustine, Boethius, Cicero, and Gregory
of Nyssa).8 The Decretum and subsequent Decretals—papal pronouncements
about legal issues that need to be addressed after the Decretum is published
—become the main source for canon law in the later Middle Ages and form
part of Catholic canon law straight through to the early twentieth century.9
The Decretum’s understanding of ‘person’ as an individual subject who has
certain inherent rights, capacities, and duties thus forms the standard for civil
and religious legal debates.
Given the extensive overlap between legal, scholastic, and religious
systems in this period, it should come as little surprise that theologians and
philosophers as well as canon lawyers were familiar with the Decretals,
drawing from them as necessary, and frequently using the term ‘persona’ as a
synonym for ‘human being’ (homo) in discussions with legal overtones.10
The term ‘persona’ also features in medieval accounts of just war theory,
particularly in contexts in which ‘who’s’ are distinguished from ‘what’s,’
subjects with moral standing from things (res). Discussions of right conduct
in war (jus in bello), for instance, employ the concept of person in detailing
appropriate rules of conduct towards the enemy, whether combatants,
noncombatants, or prisoners of war. (What rights do prisoners of war retain,
for instance, simply by virtue of being a person?)
The concept of ‘person’ is also used in delineating a group of human
beings who merit special protection under the law: miserabiles personae
(literally, persons owed mercy or pity). One of the main considerations in
generating this category was preserving the inherent dignity of the person by
ensuring that all persons had access to fair legal representation: “The term
miserabiles personae was used, in the Decretum and thereafter, to designate
precisely a category of persons recommended to judicial benevolence, whom
the clergy would represent in cases where this was normally forbidden.”11 If
you were a member of a class or group often in need and deserving of aid but
also often unable to find or afford just legal representation, the label of
‘miserabiles persona’ entitled you to representation by an assigned clergy
member. Originally this label applies only to widows, children (particularly
orphans), and the poor—categories specifically recommended for aid in
Scripture. By the mid-thirteenth century, however, the scope of the term had
expanded to include lepers, merchants, and pilgrims as well, on the grounds
that the people falling into these categories also often lacked access to fair
legal representation.12 Merchants and pilgrims, for instance, were physically
removed via travel from their local communities of support (familial,
religious, legal, or otherwise), while lepers (a category that included not
only those who had actually contracted leprosy but also others with long-
term and potentially contagious conditions, particularly skin diseases) were
socially and physically isolated.
Given the growth of trade routes and the prevalence of pilgrimage, not to
mention the increase in widows and orphans as a result of the Crusades and
more localized warfare, the number of people who fall into the category of
miserabiles personae becomes rather substantial in the later Middle Ages;
saints and holy people are often depicted in this period interacting with these
groups, performing acts like giving alms, preaching, and healing. (See Figure
5.1.) It is Francis of Assisi’s experiences with lepers (qua miserabiles
personae), for instance, that convince him that all human beings are equal in
the eyes of God—that is, that “every person without exception was seen to be
graced with the same inestimable worth and dignity given by God.”13 The
idea that the ‘least of these’ deserves to be treated with the same respect and
compassion as princes and popes becomes increasingly mainstream in the
age of the mendicant Dominican and Franciscan Orders, which are
established in the early thirteenth century and are devoted to preaching,
teaching, and ministering to everyone, not just the rich and powerful.

Figure 5.1 Dittico del Beato Andrea Gallerani, verso, detail showing four
mendicant pilgrims, Dietisalvi di Speme, c.1270, Pinacoteca Nazionale di
Siena.
 The concept of dignity is also increasingly associated with persons from
the thirteenth century onwards. Understood as conferred in large part because
of the connection of human beings with God via our creation in the image of
God (imago Dei) and the Incarnation (see Subsection 3.3), dignity becomes
one of the central features seen as distinguishing persons (personae) from
things (res). Thus, the radical fourteenth-century Franciscan Ubertino da
Casale argues that treating a pauper as lacking in dignity or worth is
equivalent to treating God that way; the poor possess a positive right to
better treatment. In his influential Arbor vitae crucifixae Iesu (Tree of Life of
the Crucified Jesus), Casale writes that those without material resources
have “a right to be sustained in dignity” and denounces “stripping the poor
Crucified One [Christ] in the persons of the poor.”14 Persons have intrinsic
worth, and all human beings are persons.

5.1.3 Theological context

Although all human beings were considered persons, no one in this period
would have supposed that human beings were the only persons. Indeed,
theological discussions of persons from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries
tend to focus more on God’s nature than on our own—particularly on how the
term ‘persona’ applies to the mysteries of the Triune God (who is professed
to be three persons in one God) and the Incarnate Christ (who is professed to
be one person with two natures).15
Theological discussions of the nature of persons date back to the earliest
attempts to hammer out the doctrine of the Trinity, but it is Boethius’s sixth-
century definition of a person as ‘an individual substance with a rational
nature’ that becomes accepted as standard in the theology faculties at Paris
and Oxford by the thirteenth century and is cited by all the major scholastics,
including Aquinas and Bonaventure.16 Taking each part of ‘individual
substance with a rational nature’ in turn, we see that the definition begins
by emphasizing the same features of ‘person’—namely, individuality and
incommunicability—that take central place in logical and grammatical
discussion. In theological contexts, the individuality and incommunicability
of persons become particularly important in spelling out how the Three
Persons of the Trinity remain distinct despite their being one God. As we see
in in Section 5.2 (and also Section 6.3), the resulting idea of ‘personal
distinction within unity’ provides medieval contemplatives with a model for
communicating the experience of mystical union with God.
The description of persons as individual substances indicates that
persons have independent existence. Medieval thinkers inherited the
substance/accident distinction of ancient philosophy, according to which
accidents (like color and shape) have dependent existence—that is, they
can’t exist without inhering in a substance (like a book or a person).
Substances have independent existence in that, although they depend on things
like book presses and parents to come into existence, their existence once
created is independent—the book or the person continues to exist whether
that book press or those parents continue to exist or not. In the case of the
Trinity, the claim that persons are individual substances means that, while
God the Creator, God the Savior, and God the Holy Spirit are one God, the
‘being’ (esse) of each Person of the Trinity is independent from the being of
the other two Persons: the Savior is not dependent for existence on the
Creator, nor the Spirit on the Savior, nor the Creator on the Spirit, etc.
In the case of human beings, this aspect of the definition of person raises
questions about whether it’s the composite of matter and form/body and soul
or the rational soul that is the person—that is, whether the soul is one part of
the substance that is the human being or a substance in its own right. On the
one hand, possessing the capacity for independent subsistence is one of the
primary characteristics of a substance, and the rational soul was widely
believed to subsist in separation from matter between death and the general
resurrection. On the other hand, the doctrine of the bodily resurrection was
taken to entail that body and soul together make up the human being, and the
view that the soul is the human being or the person was associated with
gnostic heresies. (See Section 6.1 for fuller discussion of the issues these
views raise about human immortality and the afterlife.)
Questions about the status of the rational soul occupy a great deal of
attention throughout the thirteenth century; the general consensus that emerges,
however, is that the soul is by nature only part of the human person and, thus,
cannot be a person in its own right.17 As Bonaventure writes in his
discussion of the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary to heaven, “[Mary’s]
blessedness would not have been complete unless she were there [in heaven]
as a person. The soul is not a person, but the soul joined to the body is a
person. Thus, it is clear that she is there in soul and in body.”18 Thomas
Aquinas agrees, writing that, in the case of human beings, ‘person’ signifies
“this flesh, these bones, and this soul,” and stating definitively that “neither
the name nor the definition of ‘person’ belongs to the rational soul.”19 As
Aquinas explains in his Disputed Questions on Power, “the separated soul is
part of [something with] a rational nature, namely, a human being, but it is
not the whole rational human nature, and therefore it is not a person.”20 In the
case of human beings, it is the substance composed of body and soul, not the
soul alone, that qualifies as a person.
Human beings are unusual in being physical substances that qualify as
persons, for the other beings generally considered to fit this definition in the
Middle Ages are immaterial beings such as demons, intelligences, seraphim,
cherubim, and God. The reason human beings fall into this category while
other animals are excluded is that, according to common consensus, human
beings are rational animals.21 Rationality specifically and rational
capacities generally (see Chapters 2 and 3) are understood throughout this
period as distinguishing human beings from everything else in the terrestrial
realm: rational beings are self-aware and capable of reflecting on their
thoughts, desires, and feelings, while non-rational beings not only don’t but
can’t participate in such activities.
This distinction between rational and non-rational beings was also
understood as dividing those entities who are capable of consciously
working towards their final end and attaining happiness (in the sense of
eudaimonia or beatitudo) from those who merely move as they are naturally
inclined (as a stone falls when dropped or a plant grows towards the light).22
Although today we tend to associate ‘rationality’ with only intellective
abilities, in this period it was viewed as involving volitional abilities as
well. Thus, Boethius’s inclusion of ‘rational nature’ in his definition of
person encompasses not just the ability to think but also all the aspects
involved in having control over one’s own actions—intellect and free choice
of the will first and foremost, but also memory, imagination, understanding,
and creativity. (See Section 4.1 for a detailed discussion of how imagination
fits into this picture.) Boethius’s definition of persons as individual
substances with a rational nature thus entails that persons are uniquely
capable of love and knowledge in their richest and most meaningful forms.
Love in its purest form is the desire for and union with the highest good;
knowledge in its deepest form is possession of eternal and unchanging truth.
God is understood both as the Highest Good and as Truth itself, and so union
with God is the final end (that is, happiness) for all persons.
The category of ‘person’ in theological contexts picks out all and only
those beings capable of true happiness. On this framework, we can call other
creatures happy to the extent to which they fulfill their natural ends (think of
Bob Ross painting his ‘happy little trees’), but only persons are capable of
consciously working towards, experiencing, and appreciating happiness qua
the fulfillment of their natures (via loving and knowing God). Of course, the
fact that persons possess free will means that they can—and often do—
choose things that work against this volitional and intellective union. (The
fall of Lucifer is a classic example of this.) Yet all rational beings can
participate in this union, and the stakes involved in attaining or not attaining
it are the highest possible. As we’ve seen in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, there
is a lively debate in the thirteenth–fifteenth centuries about whether
happiness consists primarily in the activity of the intellect or of the will, with
Dominicans (like Thomas Aquinas) tending to stress the centrality of intellect
in the activity of perfect happiness, and Franciscans (like John Duns Scotus)
tending to stress the centrality of the will and love. This disagreement over
the nature of perfect happiness is hardly restricted to disputed questions
generated by university masters, however—as we’ve seen already (and will
see in more detail in Sections 5.2 and 5.3 as well as Chapter 6),
contemplatives take different positions on this question as well.

5.2 Individuality, Dignity, and Rationality in Contemplative

Texts

Medieval logical/grammatical, legal/political, and theological

understandings of what it is to be a person stress the importance of
individuality, dignity, and rationality (in the broad sense that involves both
intellection and volition). In this section, I explore the role these three
concepts play in contemplative discussions about who we are and what our
final end is; as we’ll see, these discussions both echo the importance of these
features and offer further insight into how they relate to our moral and
spiritual lives.
 Before I turn to this exploration, however, a historical note about the
languages in which these discussions occur is in order. Prior to the thirteenth
century, both contemplative and scholastic texts in the Rome-based Christian
tradition are written in Latin, the language spoken as well as written
throughout the majority of Europe. Starting in the late thirteenth century,
however, contemplative texts also appear in the developing vernaculars,
while the language of the church and of the universities remains Latin.23
The rise of contemplative texts in the vernacular has two consequences
that prove important for our purposes. First, vernacular texts represent a
wider range of voices than texts written in Latin. From the thirteenth century
onward, Latin increasingly becomes the language of the elite: it is the tongue
of authority used by ecclesiastical hierarchs, university masters, magistrates
of all ranks, royalty, etc. The regional vernaculars that develop across
France, Italy, Germany, England, and the Low Countries by contrast, become
the language of everyday life. As religious movements spearheaded and
promulgated by laypeople sweep through Europe in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, we find contemplative literature written in the vernacular
by people from all walks of life—a great deal of it written by women.24 The
beguine Hadewijch, for instance, who writes in early Middle Dutch, appears
to have come from a wealthy Flemish family and to have been quite well
educated—as noblewomen often were in this period, given that they would
be responsible for running households the size of small towns (if not entire
city-states or countries) when they were married. (See Figure 5.2, which
depicts Arithmetic personified as a noblewoman taking care of financial
affairs in a counting house.) Catherine of Siena, on the other hand, is the
twenty-fourth child of a cloth dyer in the emerging Sienese lower middle
class, who dictated her Dialogue (and almost 400 letters) in her native
Tuscan dialect because she hadn’t been taught to write. Between these two
extremes we find a range of other contemplatives who express their insights
in vernacular: Angela of Foligno, a wealthy widow who dictates her
Memorial in her Umbrian dialect to a Franciscan friar who records her
words in Latin; Marguerite Porete, whose controversial Mirror of Simple
Souls appears in Old French as well as Latin (and who apparently also
translated part of the Bible from Latin into the vernacular when this was still
expressly forbidden by the pope); Mechthild of Magdeburg, a beguine who
writes her Flowing Light of the Godhead in Middle Low German; Margaret
Ebner, a Dominican nun who composes her Revelations and letters in Middle
High German; and Julian of Norwich, an anchorite whose Showings or
Revelations of Divine Love is written in Middle English.

Figure 5.2 Detail of tapestry of Arithmetic, Flanders workshop, c.1520,

Musée de Cluny, Paris.

Second, the rise of the vernacular is associated with the development of

what is often called ‘personal piety.’25 This religious sensibility focuses on
forming a meaningful emotional attachment to God, particularly Christ, the
incarnate Second Person of the Trinity; it also emphasizes humility and self-
reflection, and its devotional literature is widely read by an increasingly
literate population.26 (For more on the importance of humility and the
recommended role of emotion in the moral and spiritual life, see Chapters 2
and 4.) Arising partly in response to persistent gnostic heresies, the forms
this affective piety took were strongly influenced by the popularity of the
songs, stories, and poems about fin’amor or ‘courtly love.’ (See Interlude
Four.) An emphasis on a personal, affective connection to God was hardly
the exclusive purview of women—any number of male contemplatives during
this period also exemplify strongly affective piety, including Bernard of
Clairvaux, Francis of Assisi, Jan van Ruusbroec, Richard Rolle, and Thomas
à Kempis—but at the same time this form of embodied and creative piety
was particularly well suited to women as they were perceived at this time
(see Section 4.5). The dramatic increase in affective devotional literature
written by and for women across Europe in this period testifies to the extent
to which it spoke to them; the development of this ‘vernacular piety’ thus cuts
across gender lines as well as social hierarchies.

5.2.1 Individuality and agency

A crucial feature of affective devotional piety is an awareness of the self as a

unique individual. Although the collective nature of sin and guilt (particularly
as it relates to original sin and its consequences) also features in medieval
theological discussions, it is the status of the person as a morally responsible
individual that forms the backbone of discussions of vices and virtues,
punishments and rewards. The status of the person qua individual also
proves significant for contemplative discussions of mystical union with God,
because this union both happens on a deeply personal (in the sense of
individual) level and also frequently involves experiences which blur—and
perhaps erase—the boundaries separating individual human beings from
God.
Contemplative views about our relation to God in both mystical union and
the afterlife differ widely, as I discuss in detail in Chapter 6. Contemplatives
in apophatic-leaning mystical traditions, for instance, often speak of our final
goal as a self-abnegation so complete that any sense of individual experience
disappears. The question of whether this self-annihilation involves
ontological as well as phenomenological and epistemological erasure is
subject to debate; among medieval Christian contemplatives, Marguerite
Porete appears to go the furthest towards advocating this possibility. In her
Mirror of Simple Souls, for instance, Porete describes the goal of the
spiritual life as one in which the human person so fully merges with God that
“nothing is, except He who is, who sees Himself in such being.” When the
soul has so emptied herself that all that remains “is properly His own, and
His own proper self,” then it is as though the soul is not merely “without
existence” but was never created as a separate being in the first place,
existing simply as in idea in God’s mind, “where she was before she was
created.”27
Meister Eckhart also maintains that the closest union with God requires
relinquishing our individual personhood to become one with the Second
Person and, thus, God; to do this, we must cease to think of (or experience)
ourselves as persons with distinct intellects and wills.28 In explaining how
emptying one’s self allows God to enter, Eckhart appeals to the distinction
between individual human beings and common human nature—a move that
draws on the logical/grammatical contrast between the individual member of
a species and the species nature itself. When God took on human nature and
“united it with his own Person,” Eckhart writes, Christ assumed “bare human
nature”—not the specific created nature of any existing human being.
Eckhart’s advice to us is to mimic this action to whatever extent possible by
emptying ourselves of whatever is particular in us: “The eternal Word did
not put on a [particular] human being, so go out of whatever is a human being
in you…and take yourself just as bare human nature, and then you will be the
same to the eternal Word as human nature is to him. For between your human
nature and his there is no difference: it is one, for it is in Christ what it is in
you.”29 Johannes Tauler, Eckhart’s student and fellow Dominican, agrees that
union with God requires complete self-abnegation. Rather than portraying
love in positive terms as a rushing torrent or burning fire, as was popular in
his day,30 Tauler writes that the highest form of love “is nothing else than a
loss of self” in which “there is no affirmation.” Rather than being something
we possess or experience, love is “a privation.”31
Other medieval contemplatives (such as Hadewijch and Angela of
Foligno) use both the language of self-loss and of continued personal
distinction in their descriptions of mystical union. Angela of Foligno, for
example, reports that she regularly experiences two different sorts of
mystical union: in the first, she loses her self completely and is unable to
remember “anything about anything human, or the God-man [Christ], or
anything which has a form” in this state, while seeing and understanding “all
and nothing”; in the second, she experiences direct union with Christ while
retaining a sense of self. After looking at the cross (as encouraged by the
Meditations on the Life of Christ), for instance, she “saw and felt that Christ
was within me, embracing my soul with the very arm with which he was
crucified,” at which point she explains that she now understands “how we
will see that through [Christ] our flesh is made one with God.”32 Individual
subjectivity remains intact in this second sort of union, while it disappears
entirely in the first, which she sometimes describes as a ‘blazing darkness.’
Finally, other contemplatives (including Marguerite d’Oingt, Mechthild of
Magdeburg, Richard Rolle, and Jan van Ruusbroec) employ a ‘personal
distinction within unity’ model in their depictions of mystical union.
Marguerite d’Oingt, a thirteenth-century Carthusian nun (and author of some
of the earliest extant texts written in Franco-Provençal), for instance,
describes the beatified as completely immersed in God but nevertheless
retaining distinct, individual existence: “The saints will be within their
Creator as the fish within the sea: they will drink as much as they want,
without getting tired and without diminishing the amount of water.”33
Mechthild in turn writes of the “special intimacy with separation” as well as
the “complete fulfillment” involved in union with God in her Flowing Light
of the Godhead, and in his Fire of Love the influential fourteenth-century
English mystic Richard Rolle describes affective embodied experiences of
mystical union that not only do not extinguish but actually enhance his sense
of self, such as ‘glowing’ or heat in the chest, a taste of unimaginable
sweetness, and the sound of celestial music.34
Hadewijch writes of how God and the Beloved “penetrate each other in
such a way that neither of the two distinguishes himself from the other,” but
immediately goes on to comment that although “one sweet divine nature
flows through both and they are both one thing through each other, at the same
time they remain two different selves—yes, and remain so forever.”35 Jan
van Ruusbroec, who is influenced by Hadewijch, also describes our final
end as a “blissful unity…in which there is nothing but God and the spirit
united with God without intermediary,”36 while likewise agreeing that this
unity does not involve an actual merging of the individual self with God.
Ruusbroec in fact takes pains to be clear that we retain our human
individuality in union with God: “I just said that we are one with God,
something to which Scripture bears witness. I now wish to say that we must
forever remain different from God, which is also taught us by Scripture.”37 In
describing the highest experience of mystical union, he writes that, although
we “feel ourselves to be one with God, for by means of our transformation in
God we feel ourselves to be swallowed up in the groundless abyss of our
eternal blessedness, in which we can never discover any difference between
ourselves and God,” we are not annihilated into God, for in that case “we
would cease to be creatures.”38 On this view, mystical union joins human and
divine persons directly in a way that simultaneously retains their
individuality.
The concept of individuality and its experience in union with God plays a
key role in medieval contemplative thought—whether as something to be lost
or something that is retained. As we’ll see in Subsections 5.2.2 and 5.2.3,
this feature of personhood is also linked to the dignity and the broad sense of
rationality central to the concept of ‘person’ in this period.

5.2.2 Dignity

The importance of dignity in discussions of the human person in the Italian

Renaissance is well known, and so it comes as little surprise that the concept
features prominently in the writings of fifteenth-century mystics such as
Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.39 Ficino—deeply
involved in the translation from Greek of Plato’s dialogues, the works of
Plotinus, and other Platonists—stresses the role of dignity in human
activities, not just as it manifests in intellection but as it appears “in every
aspect of human creativity.”40 Pico della Mirandola shares Ficino’s emphasis
on the importance of dignity for understanding human nature and our place in
the cosmos; in fact, his Oratio becomes known as the Oration on the Dignity
of Man. What has frequently been ignored in these works, however, in favor
of looking for Platonism’s impact on Renaissance thought, is the extent to
which these scholars’ (and their contemporaries’) understanding of dignity is
both contiguous with and indebted to that of the contemplative traditions
which preceded them.
In theological discussions, as we saw in Section 5.1, persons are
understood as individual substances with intellects and wills, deserving of
respect and possessing intrinsic dignity. In medieval civil law and political
theory, all human beings are considered persons, who’s rather than what’s,
and as such possess certain rights and responsibilities that set us off from the
other animals and plants, as well as from non-animate objects; these rights
and responsibilities ground which actions are permissible and impermissible
both by and towards us. Over the course of the Middle Ages, dignity is a
quality that becomes consistently attributed to all human beings simply
insofar as they are human, as opposed to only those few fortunate enough to
be born into the nobility. As the English Augustine Alexander Nequam writes
in his early-thirteenth-century Commentary on Proverbs, for instance, “In
meditating on humanity, the meditator considers the dignity of human nature
as well as its fragility.”41
One might suppose that the contemplative emphasis on humility would
preclude dignity’s also being given a positive role in our moral and spiritual
lives, but dignity features prominently in the work of a number of
contemplatives—often as humility’s complement. (See Subsection 2.2.2.)
Richard of St. Victor, for instance, writes in The Mystical Ark that
“at one time, [the wisdom of God] lifts the soul to a high place and at other times presses it down
to a low place and abandons it to itself…so it first begins to kindle the soul of the contemplative
with longing for flying and at the same time to instruct it perfectly for full flight. Here, first of all,
the soul recovers its ancient dignity and claims for itself the inborn honor of its own freedom.”42

Hadewijch also stresses the need for the restoration and recovery of the
intrinsic dignity we possess by creation, but which has been marred by sin:
“With his whole heart and his whole soul, and with all his strength, and in
each and every circumstance, Christ was ready to perfect what was wanting
on our part. And thus he uplifted us and drew us up by his divine power and
his human justice to our first dignity, and to our liberty, in which we were
created and loved.”43 The dignity conferred on us by association with Christ
also sets an imposing standard which we must strive to live up to. As
Hadewijch writes in a letter to a fellow beguine, “Oh, you have much to do if
you are to live the Divinity and the Humanity and come to full growth,
according to the measure of the dignity in which you are loved and destined
by God!”44 Paradoxically, it is only when we become fully humble that we
attain true dignity.
In Mechthild of Magdeburg’s Flowing Light of the Godhead, we see the
interplay between dignity and humility when the Bride of Christ comes to
Him with four bridesmaids, the first of whom is love, “clothed in chasteness
and crowned with dignity,” and the second of whom is humility, “clothed
with lowliness and crowned with eminence.”45 In The Herald of Divine
Love, Gertrude of Helfta also muses on the paradoxical nature of human
persons: “Oh, the dignity of this minutest speck of dust that has been lifted up
out of the mud and taken as a setting for the noblest gem of heaven! Oh, the
excellence of this tiny flower which has been drawn up out of the mire by the
sun’s rays, so that it might shine with the sun’s light!”46
The relation between dignity and humility also forms an important theme
in Catherine of Siena’s Dialogue, a work which would have been known to
both Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. Although, as we saw in Section 2.2.2,
Catherine sees that the tree of self must be rooted in humility in order to bear
fruit, Truth also counsels her to opens her mind’s eye and look within God,
where she will see “the dignity and beauty (la dignità e bellezza)” of the
human person.47 As God tells her, “Because of the union I effected between
my Godhead and human nature, your excellence and dignity is greater than
that of the angels.…I, God, became human, and humanity became God
through the union of my divine nature with your human nature.”48 Throughout
the Dialogue, the humility that grounds us in God is linked with the
recognition of our intrinsic dignity as formed in God’s image—a recognition
that grants Catherine the ability to “stand with confidence in God’s presence”
to intercede for the world,49 for it is in the “dignity of our existence” that we
taste the immeasurable goodness and uncreated love of God.50
Although not a contemplative per se, the fifteenth-century Christine de
Pizan also appeals to the dignity inherent in the human person in her City of
Ladies. When the personifications of Reason, Rectitude, and Justice appear
to her in order to help construct a fortress that can stand against attacks on
woman’s character, Lady Reason holds a ‘mirror of self-knowledge’ in place
of a scepter and describes it as having “such great dignity” that it is
appropriately surrounded by rich and precious gems. When we gain
knowledge of ourselves via this mirror, we see not only our humble status as
specks of dust but also our intrinsic worth. In the words of Lady Reason,
“Thanks to this mirror, the essences, qualities, proportions, and measures of
all things can be known, nor can anything be done well without it.”51
(Catherine of Siena also associates the metaphor of the mirror of self-
knowledge with dignity: “in the gentle mirror of God she sees her own
dignity: that through no merit of hers but by his creation she is the image of
God.”52)
 5.2.3 Rationality

Dignity might be a feature of personhood that we share with God, but for
medieval contemplatives the most important point of similarity between
human persons and God is rationality, in its broadest sense. As we saw in
Subsection 5.1.3, medieval conceptions of ‘rational nature’ go beyond mere
reasoning abilities to include such things as intellection, volition,
understanding, memory, love, and imagination. All and only persons were
understood in this period to be capable of representing different potential
courses of action to themselves, judging between those options, choosing
which to enact, and reflecting on the results. In the case of human persons, the
ability to choose consciously in accordance with or against God’s will
separates us from all other material creatures (who were viewed as lacking
second-order reflective capacities) at the same time that it connects us to the
other sorts of beings (God and the whole host of immaterial creatures, such
as angels and demons) who are responsible for their actions and, thus,
blame- or praiseworthy. Because contemplative texts are written in a variety
of genres, many of which focus on first-person experience and the
development of our rational capacities, they provide an important
complement to the analytic, impersonal discussions of the nature of
rationality that we find in scholastic texts.53
One of the primary purposes of contemplative literature in this period is
to provide spiritual counsel—a task that often involves explaining what the
author sees as the ideal relation between the various aspects of the self.
Some contemplatives, for instance, advise working towards the simultaneous
fulfillment of the components of the person qua rational substance, as when
Hadewijch writes in a letter to a fellow beguine, “It is truly fitting that
everyone contemplate God’s grace and goodness with wisdom and prudence:
for God has given us our beautiful faculty of reason, which instructs us in all
our ways and enlightens us in all works. If man would follow reason, he
would never be deceived.”54 If we use reason to help us better contemplate
God’s goodness and love, Hadewijch maintains, we will grow in virtue and
wisdom as well as love.
Other contemplatives stress the importance of the human will’s complete
alignment with God’s will via the uniting act of love and downplay the work
of other parts of human nature—particularly the faculty of reason. (For more
on contemplative attitudes towards reason in this period, see Chapter 3.)
Marguerite Porete, for instance, casts her Mirror of Simple Souls as a lively
dialogue between Love, Reason, and the Soul to better portray the proper
relation between the different components of human nature. Throughout the
conversation, the characteristics and limitations of Reason serve as an
important foil to the Soul’s growing understanding of the expansive
possibilities of Love. Indeed, as the personification of Love tells Reason in
chapter 21, “I am God by divine nature, and this Soul is God by
righteousness of Love.” The proper use of reason is to help the soul progress
to the point where it glimpses this truth, at which point the soul is meant to
focus on abnegating herself, with the help of the love that unites them. As
Love says, “Thus, this precious beloved of mine is taught and guided by me
[Love], without herself, for she is transformed into me.”55
Meister Eckhart also repeatedly counsels detaching from the external
world and our own individuality as a way of moving beyond our attachment
to self and becoming one with God. What is important about our rational
nature for Eckhart is not the uniqueness of our thoughts and experiences (or
even our individual personalities) but simply its likeness to God’s nature. As
we saw in Subsection 5.2.1, this connection comes most centrally from our
possessing the same human nature that the Second Person of the Trinity
assumes in the Incarnation, not in our particular expressions of that rational
nature. Focusing too much on using our individual rational powers to learn
about the physical world around us—what Eckhart describes as “knowing
through sensible images and through concepts”—can distract from or even
actively obscure our access to the other, far more important, way of knowing.
We are one with God not through our knowledge of the world but by our
“having one being” with God.56 Johannes Tauler also counsels that we must
leave the unique expression of our rational capacities behind to become one
with God through love. To expand on a passage quoted in Subsection 5.2.1,
“This love is nothing else than a loss of self, there is no affirmation.…In it
there is ignorance and unknowing; it is far above understanding, above all
essence and modes of being.”57
As we saw in Section 3.5, the idea that our ultimate goal as human
persons involves moving beyond reason and knowledge via love becomes an
increasingly common theme from the late thirteenth to the fourteenth century,
even among contemplatives who don’t counsel self-abnegation. This
increasing distrust of ‘book learning’ or scientia reflects growing frustration
with the elitism of the universities and the specialized discussions they
churned out.58 What contemplatives sought was something deeper than mere
‘head’ knowledge—they wanted nothing less than a personal connection with
and experience of God; the massive rise in lay religious movements in this
period testifies to this being a widely shared desire.59 By the outset of the
fifteenth century, frustration with scholastic discussions of highly specialized
topics had become widespread enough that Jean Gerson, a master at the
University of Paris himself, gave two lectures titled “Against the Vain
Curiosity of Students,” and Thomas à Kempis’s fifteenth-century De
Imitatione Christi—which counsels readers to follow the model of Christ’s
life, and stresses virtue and a life of love over academic knowledge—is one
of the most popular devotional books of the later Middle Ages. As à Kempis
writes, “Many people, even after hearing scripture read so often, lack a deep
longing for it, for they do not have the spirit of Christ. Anyone who wishes to
understand Christ’s words and to savor them fully should strive to become
like him in every way.” After all, he continues, “What good does it do to
debate about the Trinity, if by a lack of humility you are displeasing to the
Trinity?”60
Even this cautioning against the value of specialized theoretical expertise,
however, retains the idea that we must make the most of our rational
capacities in order to reach our final end—it just warns against prioritizing
knowledge over love. A number of contemplatives known for their emphasis
on the unifying power of love, such as Hadewijch, Catherine of Siena, and
Julian of Norwich, highlight the importance of knowledge as well. Their
understanding of what it means for human beings to have a ‘rational nature’
involves all the ways in which we image God, not just our wills.
Catherine’s Dialogue (which is cast as an intimate conversation between
Catherine and God), for instance, characterizes the relationship between
knowledge and love as an upward spiral. Calling her ‘my dearest daughter,’
God tells Catherine about how the unitive state “in which souls are carried
off by the fire of my charity” perfects those souls so that they may reach “the
eternal vision of me in which they see and taste me in truth.” This process of
perfection involves the interplay of intellect and will, infused by God’s
grace: “In that charity, they receive supernatural light, and in that light they
love me. For love follows upon understanding. The more they know, the
more they love, and the more they love, the more they know.”61 God’s grace
allows our souls to love God even more intensely as our intellects are
illuminated: the ideal relation between the various components of a rational
nature on this view is not competitive but symbiotic. Rather than
subordinating intellect to will (or vice versa), we are encouraged to see each
as supporting and uplifting the other in the process of moral and spiritual
development that culminates in the eternal vision of God. The ultimate model
for this process, of course, is the incarnate Christ who is both identified with
Wisdom and exemplifies perfect love.62
As we’ve seen, the concepts of individuality, dignity, and rationality run
throughout medieval contemplative discussions of who we are (and what our
ultimate end is). These discussions are further enhanced by the contemplative
use of personal perspective, personification of abstract concepts, and an
emphasis on introspection that involves a narrative sense of self. In Section
5.3 I address each of these techniques in turn, showing how they encourage
the development of a rich inner life. The resulting understanding of what it
means to be a person might feel rather familiar, for (as I discuss in Section
5.4) it has influenced contemporary conceptions of the person in ways that
have often gone unacknowledged.

5.3 Personal Perspectives, Personification, and

Introspection

Contemplative literature, meant to inspire and instruct, lends itself to

dynamic expression: in the vast corpus of contemplative texts produced
during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries we find advice, expressions of
inner joys and pains, admonishments for wandering souls (from beguines to
bishops), and reports of insights gained via mystical experiences—all
written with the aim of encouraging their audiences towards moral and
spiritual growth. To express this encouragement, medieval contemplatives
tend to avoid the impersonal constructions of the scholastic disputed
questions, which use formulae such as ‘in response, it should be said that’
both for organizational purposes and to stress the truth of what is being said
over the person who happens to be sharing that truth. Instead, contemplatives
use all three ‘personal perspectives’ (the first-personal ‘I/we,’ the second-
personal ‘you,’ and the third personal ‘s/he/they’) to connect to and engage
their audiences. To make discussions of abstract and weighty matters more
lively and accessible, they also regularly personify virtues, vices, and
various components of human nature; this method is used to help us gain
deeper insight into our own spiritual journeys, via allegories like Richard of
St. Victor’s The Twelve Patriarchs (see Chapter 4), Piers Plowman and The
Pearl, and fifteenth-century devotional texts set in the Garden of
Contemplation and inspired by the secular French Roman de la Rose.63 In
addition, contemplatives throughout the Middle Ages rely on and counsel
others towards rigorous introspection and self-improvement: an essential
part of this project is the development of a robustly narrative sense of self.
The use of first-, second-, and third-personal vs. impersonal grammatical
constructions may at first seem disconnected from the project of moral and
spiritual growth, but a closer look reveals the importance of number and
person for expressing different sorts of sentiments and better communicating
various aspects of the contemplative life. Medieval contemplatives often use
the first-person singular perspective when reporting mystical experiences
and in offering spiritual advice based on their own journeys; there is an
intimacy and a humility involved in linking particular experiences and
suggestions to a particular person rather than conveying them as impersonal
truths, at the same time that this evokes authority. (First-person plural
constructions appear more often in professions of common belief and when
the text is written for particularly close-knit communities.) The first person is
also used to give voice to personified qualities, as in Porete’s Mirror, in
which Love, Soul, and Reason all speak for themselves. This allows for
vigorous disagreement between aspects of a unified self, while also
depicting the ‘how’ of spiritual progress through the resolutions of these
disagreements.
Not surprisingly, correspondence by and between contemplatives often
employs the second-personal perspective. From Francis and Clare of Assisi
to Hadewijch to Margaret Ebner to Catherine of Siena, we find medieval
religious figures drawing on the epistles of the New Testament and using
letters to provide vital sources of encouragement and support—as well as
warning and critique—to individuals and communities large and small. The
second-personal perspective frequently appears in sermons and books of
counsel as well: contexts in which the audience is being addressed
simultaneously as a group and as individual people, meant to take what they
hear to heart and apply it to their own lives. The use of the second person is
also common in dialogues and poetry in which God (or personified quality)
is talking directly to the subject, or in which the subject is speaking directly
to God. The effect has an engaging directness. When Angela of Foligno
reports shrieking, “Love yet unknown, why do you leave me?!” repeatedly as
her vision of God fades at Assisi, she illustrates the personal nature of that
mystical experience (and reminds her audience of times when they’ve also
felt abandoned by love). When Hadewijch exclaims, “Oh, you have much to
do if you are to live the Divinity and the Humanity and come to full growth!”
the reader can’t hide behind a comforting veil of anonymity. There is a zing
of immediate connection formed by use of the second person—it both
assumes and creates a relationship between speaker and audience; it is the
difference between my giving a lecture on Aristotle’s virtue ethics in which I
say, “Generosity can be expressed in a variety of ways depending on one’s
individual mean,” and one in which I say directly to a student, “Tony, do
remember when you lent your pen to Xinyi last week? Aristotle thinks that
whether that act was generous or not depends on why you did that, and how
you felt when you did.” Medieval contemplatives are committed to the
lifelong process of changing for the better, and they’re invested in helping
you—yes, you, whenever and wherever you may be—to do the same.
The third-personal perspective also appears in contemplative texts.
Because the third person is distanced both from the self who authors a text
and that text’s audience, however, contemplatives tend to use it less often
than the first or second person. When they do use the third person, it is often
to report general states of affairs or facts, as when Hadewijch and Angela of
Foligno report visions in which they are given explanations about what is
happening around them or insight into the differences between virtues and
vices, etc. Sometimes the choice of the third person is meant to demonstrate
humility and modesty, as when mystics like Marguerite d’Oingt and
Mechthild of Hackeborn share mystical experiences in the third person,
although it is clear from context and the rest of the text that the experiences
they report are their own. (See Interlude Five for more on the relation
between this and medieval methods for establishing authority as an author.)
Other times, the third person is chosen as a way of introducing the speaker,
as in Julian of Norwich’s A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman, which
begins by linking what follows to a particular person, time, and place: “Here
is a vision, showed by the goodness of God to a devout woman. And her
name is Julian, who is a recluse at Norwich, and is still alive in the year of
our Lord 1413. In this vision are very many comforting and greatly stirring
words for all those who desire to be Christ’s lovers.”64 Finally, the third
person is also used by those writing the vitae (‘lives’ or personal histories)
of mystics and contemplatives: this genre, which is meant to underscore the
sanctity and devotion of holy men and women, and to offer models of piety
for their readers, talks about its subjects and thus lacks the sense of
connection and urgency generated by the use of the first and second person.65
The technique of imagining abstract concepts (such as the seven liberal
arts, virtues, and vices) and different components of the human soul as
persons with their own characters and motivations also plays an important
role in many contemplative texts—and the same is true in art from this period
as well. (See Figure 5.3, which shows some of the qualities needed for good
government in The Allegory of Good and Bad Government, including
personifications of Magnanimity, Temperance, Fortitude, and the three
theological virtues; see also Figures 2.2, 3.1, 5.2, and I5.1.) Unlike the
dialogues of the earlier Plato and Augustine (and the later Berkeley and
Hume), which are framed as conversations between two or more human
beings, the dialogues of Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete,
Catherine of Siena, and others tend to take place between various facets of
the inner self, or between the self and God. This enables the author to draw
out the nature of certain inner conflicts and to encourage personal growth by
modeling solutions and ways forward. In Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls,
for instance, Reason consistently asks for explanations (which do not satisfy
her), while Love seeks to lead the Soul towards union with God, and the
Soul wonders what she should do. Towards the end of the Mirror, these
tensions have been resolved by the Soul’s recognition of her identity as Love,
and it is only the Annihilated Soul who speaks, having become One with this
Love.
Figure 5.3 Detail of Allegory of Good Government from The Allegory of
Good and Bad Government, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, 1338–9, Palazzo
Pubblico, Siena.
Figure I5.1 Personified figures of Humility and Pride from illumination of
La Somme le Roi, workshop of Honoré, c.1280.

The personification of various aspects of the self in these dialogues is

often humorous as well as instructive. In chapter 2 of the first book of
Mechthild’s Flowing Light of the Godhead, for instance, Soul leaves the
body, sees “one complete God in three Persons and knows three Persons in
one God undivided,” experiences bliss—and then is sent back down to
earthly life, where she has a decidedly prosaic squabble with her body:
Then the body speaks: “Well, woman, just where have you been? You come back so love-struck,
lovely and vibrant, free and witty. Your carrying on has cost me my appetite, sense of smell,
color, and all my strength.”
She says: “Shut up, murderer! Quit your bellyaching. I’ll always be on my guard with you
around. That my enemy has been wounded – what do we care about that? It makes me glad.”66

These sorts of imaginative conversations allow their authors to articulate

complex theologies and experiences in vivid and relatable ways, ‘showing’
rather than ‘telling’ how the various aspects of the human person relate to
each other.
 The use of inner dialogue also reflects the enormous importance of
introspection and self-knowledge for thirteenth–fifteenth-century mystical
and contemplative thought. A precondition for spiritual growth and mystical
union, introspection is also portrayed as the best means for gaining
knowledge about both self and the divine. (See Chapter 2 for fuller
discussion.) Even contemplatives with vastly different conceptions of the
final end of human beings (such as Meister Eckhart and Julian of Norwich)
enjoin their readers to regularly look inward—not just at the beginning of
their spiritual journeys but at various intervals along the way. In Catherine of
Siena’s Dialogue, Truth itself proclaims, “Here is the way, if you would
come to perfect knowledge and enjoyment of me, eternal Life: Never leave
the knowledge of yourself.”67
The narrative sense of self that this sort of introspection both requires and
develops is vital to the contemplative project. As Hadewijch makes clear in
a letter to a fellow beguine, this introspection not only involves an
examination of one’s current states (“in all your conduct, in your attraction or
aversion, in your behavior, in love, in hate, in fidelity, in mistrust, and in all
things that befall you”) but also involves projecting oneself forward into the
future and learning from one’s past: “You must examine yourselves as to how
you can endure everything disagreeable that happens to you, and how you can
bear the loss of what gives you pleasure.”68 Contemplative texts throughout
this period stress the existence of the self as a unified and reflective
consciousness that persists through (and, in fact, can be both improved by
and corroded by) changes over time. As I discuss in Section 5.4, many of
these underlying medieval assumptions about who we are carry forward into
what we think about the self today.

5.4 Looking Forward: Locke and Personalism

As we saw in Section 5.1, the overlapping contexts in which the term

‘person’ is employed in medieval discussions—legal, political, grammatical,
logical, and theological—give rise to an understanding of the term which
emphasizes unique individuality, intrinsic dignity, and rationality (in a broad
sense). In the thirteenth–fifteenth centuries, an emphasis on these features
combines with the use of first- and second- person perspectives,
personification and inner dialogue, and an emphasis on introspection to
create a much richer understanding of who we are as persons than the
accepted scholastic definition, ‘individual substance with a rational nature,’
might imply. Furthermore, although largely neglected by scholars of medieval
philosophy (who concentrate on texts produced by masters of theology at the
universities at Oxford and Paris), the complex conception of the self that
emerges from medieval contemplative texts is both important in its own time
and prefigures John Locke’s classic seventeenth-century definition of the
person, as well as influencing the nineteenth–twentieth-century theory of
personalism.
Contemporary philosophical discussions of persons often go back only as
far as John Locke’s 1689 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in
which Locke characterizes the person as a “thinking intelligent Being, that
has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking
thing in different times and places; which it does by that consciousness,
which is inseparable from thinking, and as it seems to me essential to it.”69
There are obvious differences between Locke’s definition and medieval
understandings—most significantly, the fact that Locke distinguishes between
the human being and the human person, which medieval treatments of the term
do not, and the use of the word ‘consciousness,’ which is not yet in play in
medieval discussions.70 At the same time there is a great deal of (indeed, for
scholars of philosophy in the early modern period and later perhaps a
startling amount of) overlap between Locke’s definition and medieval
contemplative conceptions of what it means to be a person. Central to both
are intelligence and rationality; central to both are the idea of the self as
reflexive and introspective. Locke and medieval contemplatives also agree
that this capacity for self-reflection connects our present with our past and
future selves. The stress on the continuity of a narrative sense of self, as
opposed to physical continuity, forms another important point of connection.
(See Chapter 6 for discussion of how this plays out in medieval discussions
of death, immortality, and the afterlife.)
Another influential modern theory of persons—personalism—also
resonates deeply with thirteenth–fifteenth-century contemplative conceptions
of who we are. Usually understood as taking root in the nineteenth century
and flowering in the early twentieth century, personalism sees the line drawn
between persons and non-persons as carving nature at its joints: only persons
have an awareness of themselves as subjects and agents, only persons are
free, and only persons are morally responsible for their actions.71 Like
medieval contemplative discussions which emphasize the importance of
individuality, dignity, and rationality both in relation to self and in relation to
God, personalism stresses the “moral and religious dimensions which are
part and parcel of the person’s nature as a conscious, intelligent, free, willing
subject in relation with God and others.”72
Finally, both the medieval contemplative tradition and personalism see
creativity and emotionality as intimately connected with rationality. The
meditations genre is meant to encourage and evoke certain affective modes
(see Section 4.2), and one of the main tools of contemplation is introspection,
whose language is intimately personal, stressing individual accountability
and experience. Attempts to convey the results of such self-reflection give
rise to a variety of forms of creative expression in the thirteenth–fifteenth
centuries, including but not limited to poetry, dialogues, and visionary
literature. Furthermore, the aim of these forms of creative expression is
typically communal edification in addition to personal improvement—the
inherently practical bent of contemplative philosophy keeps it grounded in
the reality of our individual experiences, which include our connectedness to
the world around us. Personalism shares this grounded vision of who we are:
“As free, thinking subjects, persons also exercise creativity through their
thought, imagination, and action, a creativity which affects both the
surrounding world and the person [herself].”73 Personalism often
acknowledges its debt to medieval scholastics such as Thomas Aquinas; it
seems to me past time for it to rediscover its connection to the contemplative
movement as well.74

Interlude Five

Why Do Medieval Women Talk like They Hate Themselves?

The way medieval women talk about themselves can strike the modern
reader as rather horrifying. Clare of Assisi, for instance, refers to herself as
an “unworthy servant” and a “useless handmaid,” while Marguerite d’Oingt
describes herself as a “small worm,” and Julian of Norwich tells her readers
not to think of her as a teacher on the grounds that she is “a woman, lewd
[uneducated], feeble, and frail.”75 This has contributed to the impression that
women authors from this period weren’t intellectually sophisticated and
didn’t consciously engage in philosophical and theological debates, as well
as bolstering perceptions of the Middle Ages as a period in which a healthy
sense of self-worth was discouraged by the Catholic Church and women in
particular suffered from external and internalized misogyny. It has also led to
something like despair among feminist scholars, leading one to ask, “Can
anything be reclaimed from the self-denigrating rhetoric of medieval women
in the Christian tradition?”76 Yet though even the most brilliant women in this
period faced significant obstacles to being heard—especially insofar as they
were barred from holding prominent positions in ecclesiastical and
university hierarchies—there are at least two good reasons not to read
medieval women’s self-effacing claims at face value. First, many of these
self-descriptors appear as part of formulaic ‘humility topoi,’ a common trope
in texts written by both women and men in this period, and one that women in
particular use to demonstrate their familiarity with literary niceties and to
forestall objections to their exercising philosophical and theological
authority. Second, the virtue of humility gains special importance in the
Middle Ages as the necessary counterpoint to pride, the deadliest of sins.
(See Figure I5.1, in which the personification of humility stands on the left
and a figure representing pride literally takes a fall.) The more women
emphasize (and even exaggerate) their humble stations, the more strength they
give to their claims to be mouthpieces of God—the only universally
recognized authority in their world.
Humility topoi (“I, of course, know little, and yet…,” “You must excuse
me for the errors I am sure to make,” etc.) appear in all sorts of contexts
across all sorts of traditions, but the emphasis on self-examination and moral
and spiritual development in contemplative texts entails that they are
especially likely to feature there. Such formulae can take different forms
depending on the context; in the medieval Christian tradition, humility
formulae tend to include professions of unworthiness, of low value relative
to others as well as God, and of an inability to express properly what should
be said due to lack of knowledge and/or education. Thus Anselm of
Canterbury (author of the famous ‘Ontological Argument’ for God’s
existence) calls himself “a trivial and inconsiderable fellow” and “a man of
very little knowledge,” despite the fact that he is the head of the Church in
England at the time, and Bonaventure (Aquinas’s renowned contemporary)
states that he feels “unworthy and unequal to the task” of writing the life of
St. Francis when he is the Minister General of the entire Franciscan Order.77
Medieval humility formulae also frequently contain pleas for divine
illumination and/or note that anything of value in the following work should
be attributed entirely to God’s grace. Importantly, they also often set out the
text’s motivation and larger purpose and provide a justification for why the
project is being tackled by this particular author.78
In the case of medieval women, understanding the conventions of the
humility topos helps us to see how women often use these conventions to
establish authorial authority. Clare of Assisi, for instance, refers to herself as
“Clare, an unworthy servant of Christ and a useless handmaid of His
handmaids in the monastery of San Damiano of Assisi” as part of a greeting
in in her fourth letter to Agnes of Prague. Clare’s mention of herself as an
unworthy servant directly follows Christ’s instruction to his disciples: “So
you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say,
‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty’” (Luke 17:10). Yet
Clare is also echoing the founder of her Order and personal mentor, Francis,
who refers to himself as “brother Francis, a useless man and unworthy
creature of the Lord God” in a letter written to his entire Order (and with
which Clare, as head of the Second Order of the Franciscans, would have
been familiar).79 In using these descriptions for herself, Clare is
simultaneously modeling humility to Agnes and demonstrating her familiarity
with and connection to the head of her Order.
Similarly, when the Carthusian prioress Marguerite d’Oingt calls herself
a “small worm,” it is again instructive to look at the broader context in which
she writes these words. First, she has just identified God (in the form of the
Second Person of the Trinity) as her own brother: “Sweet dear Lord, you are
my brother; but it is very presumptious [sic] of me to say this, since I am a
small worm and you are so great and worthy that all learned people who
ever were and who will ever be do not know how to describe you or to think
about you.”80 Second, Marguerite is writing these words in Latin, the
language of scholarship—the fact that she explicitly mentions the inability of
‘learned people’ to comprehend the mystery of the Incarnation is no accident.
Third, in the very next sentence, Marguerite makes it clear that the source of
her words is not human but divine: “Oh beautiful sweet Lord Jesus Christ,
who gave me the audacity to speak of such marvellous [sic] things if not you
who are the true God and my brother and who showed us the greatest love?”
Taken in context, Marguerite’s apparent self-denigration actually highlights
the fact that she is claiming wisdom that comes directly from God.
Julian of Norwich also uses the same strategy, as do any number of other
contemplatives in this period, downplaying her education and literary
abilities in order to emphasize that the source of what she has to say is the
highest authority possible. What immediately follows her self-effacing
comment about being “a woman, lewd [uneducated], feeble, and frail,” for
instance, is a confident assertion that highlights her work’s emphasis on
God’s love: “But I know well that what I say I have received from the
showing of him who is sovereign teacher. Indeed, charity stirs me to tell you
it.” Finally, she responds explicitly to worries about a woman’s writing
about such important theological matters by appealing to Augustine’s theory
of divine illumination:
But because I am a woman, should I therefore believe that I should not tell you the goodness of
God, since I saw in that same time that it is his will that it be known? And that [it is God’s will]
you shall well see in what follows, if it be well and truly understood. Then shall you soon forget
me who is a wretch, and do so that I not interfere with your learning, and behold Jesus who is
the teacher of all.81

Julian’s calling herself a wretch functions in this context primarily to draw

attention to the fact that all human beings are wretches in comparison to God;
drawing on the Augustinian theology that informs her work, Julian reminds
her readers that the only real teacher is God, from whom all authority comes.
In short, far from expressing self-loathing and internalized misogyny,
medieval women’s use of humility formulae and apparent self-denigration
more often indicate self-conscious engagement with the theological and
philosophical debates of their day, as well as establishing the source of the
authority for their claims as God. Although this may not satisfy modern
readers who would rather see women claim authority in their own right, it is
vital to understand that no one writing contemplative literature in the Middle
Ages would make this move—the confidence which university masters
settling disputed questions appear to display is a function of the genre more
than a function of men’s and women’s differing self-assessments in this
period.82
 1 For book-length discussions of the development of the concept of person, see Persons: a
History, ed. A. LoLordo, Oxford Philosophical Concepts Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2019) and Theo Kobusch’s Die Entdeckung der Person: Metaphysik der Freiheit und modernes
Menschenbild (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997).
2 For more detail on these histories, see chs 1–3 of LoLordo, ed., Persons: a History.
3 The classic work on supposition theory is L. M. deRijk’s Logica Modernorum—A Contribution
to the History of Early Terminist Logic, which was published in two parts: On the Twelfth Century
Theories of Fallacy (1962) and the two-volume The Origin and Development of the Theory of
Supposition (1967) by Van Gorcum and Co. For more recent perspectives that take later developments
and also grammatical texts into account, see Medieval Supposition Theory Revisited, ed. E. P. Bos
(Leiden: Brill Publishing, 2013).
4 For further discussion of the importance of the property of incommunicability for persons,
especially as it applies in theological contexts, see John Crosby’s “The Incommunicability of Human
Persons,” The Thomist 57/3 (1993), pp. 403–42.
5 Maintaining the distinction between the three persons of the Trinity is crucial in Christological
debates throughout the Middle Ages. For detailed discussion of the logic as well as the theology of these
debates, see Tim Pawl’s In Defense of Conciliar Christology, Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
6 The Averroistic position has the virtue of explanatory simplicity, in that it explains how everyone’s
concepts of universals like ‘dog’ and ‘justice’ share the same referents—namely, there is only one
intellect producing those concepts, to which everyone has access. At the same time, the theory of the
Unity of the Intellect raises a number of vexed questions for the possibility of post-mortem existence,
because it’s not clear what persistence conditions would suffice to individuate non-embodied beings with
just one ‘thinking center.’ For the range of positions taken on these issues, see Richard Dales’s The
Problem of the Rational Soul in the Thirteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1995).
7 This use of the term draws on the way in which the Greek word prosopon (from which the Latin
word ‘persona’ is derived) refers not just to the masks used in drama but also to the various roles those
masks signify.
8 For an overview of Gratian’s compilation of the Decretum and the history of the Decretals, see
Brian Tiereny’s Medieval Poor Law: A Sketch of Cannonical Theory and Its Application in
England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), pp. 7–10.
9 The Decretals forms the first part of the Roman Catholic Corpus Iuris Canonici until 1917, at
which point the Corpus is replaced by the Codex Iuris Canonici—itself still heavily indebted to
medieval and Roman sources.
10 See, for instance, Aquinas’s discussion of marriage in Summa contra gentiles 3.125.
11 Janet Coleman, ‘Property and Poverty,’ in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political
Thought c.350–c.1450, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.), p. 627.
12 For further discussion of this category and the complications involved in determining to whom it
applied, see Robert Shaffern’s Law and Justice from Antiquity to Enlightenment (Lanham, ML:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009), pp. 131–3. See also Michael Cusato’s “Poverty,” in The
Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, eds. R. Pasnau and C. Van Dyke (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 577–92.
13 Cusato, “Poverty,” p. 587.
 14 Arbor vitae crucifixae Iesu I.1. See Campion Murray, OFM, “Poverty in The Tree of the
Crucified Life of Jesus by Ubertino da Casale,” in Poverty and Devotion in Mendicant Cultures
1200–1450, ed. C. Mews and A. Welch (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 45–60.
15 Nestorianism is the objectionable view in the neighborhood, where Christ’s human and divine
natures are viewed as separate persons. For a detailed philosophical discussion of the concept of
‘person’ as it relates to the Incarnation, see Pawl, In Defense of Conciliar Christology.
16 See Scott Williams’s “Persons in Patristic and Medieval Christian Theology,” in LoLordo, ed.,
Persons: a History, pp. 52–86, for further discussion of the development of this definition and the
various controversies it involves.
17 See Dales, Problem of the Rational Soul, for a comprehensive discussion of the issues and
which figures took which position on them.
18 Bonaventure, Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary I.2.9.
19 Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia 29.4.co and 29.1.ad5 respectively. The rest of ad5 reads as
follows: “the soul is part of the human species; for this reason, since it is still by nature unitable [to a
body] even when it is separated, it cannot be the sort of individual substance which is called a
‘hypostasis’ or ‘first substance’ any more than a hand or any other part of a human being can.”
(Translation mine.)
20 Aquinas, Summa theologiae 9.2.ad14.
21 For more on medieval views about animals, particularly as these views develop in the thirteenth
century, see Nigel Harris’s The Thirteenth-Century Animal Turn: Medieval and Twenty-First-
Century Perspectives (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); and Ian Wei’s Thinking about Animals in
Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary Between Humans and Animals
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
22 See, e.g., Aquinas’s Treatise on Happiness (ST IaIIae 1–5) for further discussion, as well as his
all-too-often-overlooked discussion of happiness in Summa contra gentiles, chs 25–63.
23 Both contemplative and scholastic texts tend to focus on topics in which our status as persons is
less relevant than our unique status as intellective beings who are also material substances, such as the
development of virtue and how human beings will experience the afterlife. For this reason, the Latin
word for human being (homo) is used more often than the word for person in these conversations; the
term ‘person’ tends to appear in discussions with legal and political overtones. This is often obscured in
modern English translations of these texts, however, which often render the terms for ‘man’ or ‘human
being’ as ‘person,’ to capture the original, gender-neutral sense of those terms or to be more inclusive.
24 For a sense of the full range of voices involved in vernacular conversations and more on the
history of the development of these conversations, see Bernard McGinn’s Varieties of Vernacular
Mysticism: 1350–1550, Vol. 5 of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism.
(New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 2016.)
25 For an extended discussion of this connection, see Barbara Newman’s “Love Divine, All Loves
Excelling,” in her God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp. 138–89. For an argument that personal piety
was alive and well long before the thirteenth century, however, see Lauren Mancia’s Emotional
Monasticism: Affective piety in the eleventh-century monastery of John of Fécamp (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2019).
 26 The popular devotional Meditations on the Life of Christ (Meditationes vitae Christi), for
instance, is translated from its original Latin into a number of vernaculars and disseminated widely. This
speaks to the “expanded audience for devotional texts of all kinds” that Thomas Bestul notes
characterizes the later Middle Ages, and which is “occasioned by the increase in literacy, particularly
among laypersons of the aristocratic and bourgeois classes, and the growth of opportunities for private
leisure and devotion” (“Meditatio/Meditation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism,
ed. A. Hollywood and P. Dailey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 163).
27 Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. E. L. Babinsky (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1993), ch. 118, p. 194,
and ch. 135, p. 218.
28 See, e.g., Sermon 70 in Complete Mystical Works of Eckhart, trans. Maurice O’C. Walshe
(New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 2010).
29 Sermon 92, Complete Mystical Works of Eckhart, p. 450.
30 Richard Rolle’s most famous work, for instance, is titled simply The Fire of Love. Hadewijch also
uses the language of burning flame for mystical union with God, as well as that of rushing water. See,
e.g., Letter 16, where she writes that “love enkindles faith; works with faith must precede love; then
love will set them on fire” (p. 81), and Letter 6, in which she describes Love as “bursting her dikes” and
overwhelming the lover like a flood (p. 63).
31 Sermon for the Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity (V 76), as quoted in B. McGinn, The
Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (1300–1500), Vol. 4 of The Presence of God: A
History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 2005), p. 274.
32 Ch. 6, 4th Supplemental Step, from the Memorial, in Angela of Foligno: Complete Works,
trans. Paul Lachance, OFM (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1993), p. 175.
33 Ch. 2, para. 19, in The Writings of Margaret of Oingt, Medieval Prioress and Mystic (d.
1310), trans. with an introduction, essay, and notes by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski (Cambridge: D. S.
Brewer, 1990), p. 44.
34 Book II, Flowing Light of the Godhead, pp. 70–1.
35 Hadewijch, Letter 9, p. 66.
36 John Ruusbroec: The Spiritual Espousals and Other Works, ed. and trans. John A. Wiseman.
(Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1985), Book II, Part 4, p. 119.
37 Ruusbroec: Spiritual Espousals, p. 174. This is the opening of a section in The Sparkling
Stone bluntly titled “Our Union with God is Not an Identification: Four Ways of Experiencing This
Union.”
38 Ruusbroec: Spiritual Espousals, p. 176.
39 See, for instance, Paul Oskar Kristeller’s “The Dignity of Man,” in Renaissance Concepts of
Man and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), pp. 1–21, as well as any number of his
other works on Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, and Charles Trinkaus’s two-volume ‘In Our Image
and Likeness’: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1970).
40 McGinn, Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism, p. 257; for a helpful overview of Ficino and Pica
della Mirandola’s Platonic-influenced mysticism, see pp. 252–84.
41 Nequam’s unpublished manuscript in Oxford, Jesus College, MS. 94, fol. 57r, as reported by
Thomas H. Bestul in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, p. 161.
 42 Richard of St. Victor: The Twelve Patriarchs, The Mystical Ark, Book Three of the Trinity,
trans. Grover Zinn (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1979), p. 192.
43 Hadewijch, Letter 6, p. 63.
44 Hadewijch, Letter 18, p. 85.
45 Flowing Light of the Godhead, p. 63.
46 Gertrude of Helfta: The Herald of Divine Love, trans. and ed. Margaret Winkworth (Mahwah:
Paulist Press, 1993), p. 108.
47 Prologue to the Dialogue, p. 25.
48 Dialogue, p. 205, slightly modified translation.
49 Dialogue, ch. 13, p. 49.
50 Dialogue, ch. 51, p. 104.
51 The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Richards (New York: Persea Books, 1982, rev.
1998), p. 9.
52 Dialogue, ch. 13, p. 48.
53 It’s worth noting in this respect that Bonaventure and Meister Eckhart, both of whom wrote
popular (and thus surviving) mystical/contemplative treatises in addition to their scholastic works,
present a valuable opportunity to examine how modalities of expression affect the content of what is
expressed.
54 Hadewijch, Letter 14, p. 77.
55 Mirror of Simple Souls, p. 104.
56 Sermon 76 in Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, ed. B McGinn, trans. B. McGinn, F.
Tobin, and E. Borgstadt (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1986), pp. 327–8.
57 Sermon for the Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity (V 76), trans. McGinn, in The Harvest of
Mysticism, from Vetter’s Die Predigten Taulers.
58 For more about the history of scientia in this period, see Robert Pasnau’s “Medieval Social
Epistemology: Scientia for Mere Mortals,” Episteme 7/1 (2010), pp. 23–41.
59 For more about these movements, see McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval
Germany.
60 Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, trans. William C. Creasy (Notre Dame, IN: Ave
Maria Press, 2017), ch. 1, p. 25.
61 Dialogue, p. 85.
62 See Barbara Newman’s “Sapientia: the Goddess Incarnate,” in God and the Goddesses (pp.
190–244) for a detailed discussion of this identification.
63 As Gabriela Badea notes in “Allegories of Selfhood in Medieval Devotional Literature” (Doctoral
Thesis, Columbia University, 2018), “The literary setting of the Roman de la Rose came to be associated
with a devotional representation of the self in the later Middle Ages.” The popularity of this trend is
reflected in the fact that Catherine of Siena’s Dialogue is titled The Orchard of Syon when it is
translated into English at the turn of the fifteenth century. For more on the history of this translation, see
Sister Mary Denise’s “The Orchard of Syon: an Introduction,” Traditio 14 (1958), pp. 269–93.
 64 “A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman,” in The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision
Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, ed. N. Watson and J. Jenkins. (University
Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), p. 63.
65 For examples of how complicated it becomes to tease apart the actual histories, attitudes, and
actions of the subjects of these vitae from what is written about them, see the essays in Catherine
Mooney’s edited collection Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), as well as those in Caroline Walker Bynum’s Fragmentation
and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone
Books, 1991).
66 Flowing Light of the Godhead, Ch. 2, Bk I, p. 41. The Soul’s indifference to Body’s suffering is
reminiscent of Soul’s rejoicing in Porete’s Mirror at the death of Reason, and is meant to show us what
the proper attitude to such things should be.
67 Dialogue, p. 29.
68 Hadewijch, Letter 14, p. 77.
69 John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1975), 2.27.9, p. 335. For discussion of this definition and later developments of the
term in Western philosophy, see chs 5–8 of LoLordo, ed., Persons: A History.
70 The concepts of human person and human being are inextricably intertwined in the Middle Ages;
they become separable only after a mechanistic worldview starts to crowd out the teleological notion of
substantial form, and ‘human being’ starts to connote something different from what ‘person’ connotes
—an animal body with a soul, as opposed to subject of consciousness. For more on the decline of
teleology and substantial forms, see Robert Pasnau’s Metaphysical Themes 1274–1671 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011) and After Certainty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
71 Three of the major works which define and develop this theory are Borden Parker Browne’s
Personalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1908), Martin Buber’s 1923 Ich and Du (I and Thou),
trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1987, 2nd ed.), and Albert Cornelius Knudson’s
The Philosophy of Personalism (New York: Abingdon Press, 1927).
72 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/personalism/.
73 Ibid.
74 For personalist acknowledgments of its scholastic forbears, see, e.g., Étienne Gilson’s “Le
personnalisme chrétien,” in L’esprit de la philosophie médiévale (Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin,
1932), ch. 10, pp. 195–215; and Karol Wojtyla’s “Thomistic Personalism,” in Person and Community:
Selected Essays (Catholic Thought from Lublin: Vol. 4), ed. Andrew Woznicki (New York: Peter
Lang, 1993), pp. 165–75.
75 Francis and Clare: The Complete Works, trans. R. J. Armstrong and I. C. Brady (Mahwah:
Paulist Press, 1986), p. 195; The Writings of Margaret of Oingt, Medieval Prioress and Mystic (d.
1310), p. 27; Short Text, section 6, my rendering into modern English from the text in The Writings of
Julian of Norwich, p. 75.
76 Michelle Voss Roberts, “Retrieving Humility: Rhetoric, Authority, and Divinization in Mechthild of
Magdeburg,” Feminist Theology 18/1 (2009), pp. 50–73, p. 50.
77 Anselm: The Complete Treatises, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co.,
2022); Bonaventure: The Soul’s Journey into God; The Tree of Life; the Life of St. Francis, trans.
Ewert Cousins (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1978), pp. 182–3.
 78 For further discussion of this, see my “Lewd, Feeble, and Frail: Humility Formulae, Medieval
Women, and Authority,” in Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy Vol. 10 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2022), forthcoming.
79 Francis and Clare, “A Letter to the Entire Order,” p. 60.
80 The Writings of Margaret of Oingt, p. 27.
81 The Writings of Julian of Norwich, p. 75.
82 An earlier version of this piece was published as an APA (American Philosophical Association)
blog post at https://blog.apaonline.org/2021/05/19/lewd-feeble-and-frail-subverting-sexist-tropes-to-gain-
authority. For a much more developed discussion, see my “Lewd, Feeble, and Frail: Humility Formulae,
Medieval Women, and Authority.”
 6
Immortality and the Afterlife

For medieval contemplatives, the debates laid out in Chapters 2–5 about who
we are and how we should live are not just theoretically interesting—they
revolve around pressing questions whose answers have potentially eternal
consequences. In this final chapter I turn to views about the culmination of
the contemplative life in the afterlife. As we’ll see, discussions of
immortality and the afterlife also speak volumes about a host of other
important philosophical issues, including views about God, embodiment,
happiness, love, and what it means to be human.
One of my goals in this chapter is to offer a more holistic framework of
medieval perspectives on immortality and the afterlife than is currently
available, which I hope will prove useful for future discussions. The
scholastic (that is, university-based) and contemplative traditions of the
thirteenth–fifteenth centuries share a common interest in our ultimate end, but
they differ widely with respect to methodology and focus, and most
contemporary philosophical discussions of medieval views on the afterlife
engage only scholastic sources. These formal disputations tend to concentrate
on the nature of the rational soul and its prospects for surviving the death of
the body, the state of the rational soul while separated from the body, and/or
puzzles surrounding the identity of the resurrected body. They address the
question of what we might expect immortality and the afterlife to be like only
tangentially, in discussions of the bodily resurrection, the nature of perfect
happiness (which we can attain only in the life to come), and scriptural
passages such as the story of the rich man and Lazarus that were taken to
refer to or provide insight into the afterlife.1 Scholastic discussions tend to
be theoretical as opposed to experiential, often displaying a lively curiosity
about questions such as how long our hair will be and how old we will look
in heaven.2 Contemplative and mystical works, by contrast, are interested
more in the phenomenology of immortality—what we can expect to
experience in the life to come, and to what extent mystical union in this life
might provide a foretaste of those experiences. The result is a less systematic
approach to the topic that contains a wealth of first-person reports of union
with God.
I begin this chapter by sketching in Section 6.1 the Platonist and
Aristotelian theories of the rational soul and its relation to human nature that
set the general metaphysical parameters for medieval discussions of
immortality and the afterlife. Because contemplative accounts of this topic
have received so much less philosophical attention than their scholastic
counterparts, I concentrate in Sections 6.2 and 6.3 on contemplative
expectations for our experience of immortality, looking first (in Section 6.2)
at accounts that describe transcending the soul’s experiences of individuality
to merge with God in selfless union, and then (in Section 6.3) at accounts that
portray everlasting union with God in affective and embodied terms. In
Section 6.4, I argue that the extremes of the views discussed in the previous
sections can be taken as ideological endpoints of what I call an ‘experiential
continuum of immortality.’ Appreciating the full range of this continuum—
which extends well beyond the endpoints typically found in scholastic
accounts of immortality—allows us not just to better understand
contemplative motivations, advice, and views, but also to better situate
different scholastic positions with respect to each other, as I demonstrate in
Section 6.4 via a brief comparison of Robert Grosseteste’s and Thomas
Aquinas’s views. As a whole, the chapter provides the final case study of the
philosophical methodology I laid out in Chapter 1 and have been employing
in each subsequent chapter: including contemplative perspectives about
immortality and the afterlife corrects mistakenly narrow impressions of what
medieval figures thought about the topic, and it complements existing
scholarship by expanding the range of both the views under discussion and
the voices offering those views.

6.1 The Metaphysics of Immortality

Questions of the ‘how’ and ‘what’ of immortality in the Middle Ages tend to
revolve around the relation of rational soul to human body.3 It was generally
assumed that non-rational animals did not survive their death, whereas
intellective, immaterial beings such as angels were immortal, since their lack
of connection to matter meant that they were in no danger of corruption.4 The
case of human beings was complicated by the fact that we are both animals
whose bodies suffer corruption and rational beings capable of intellective
cognition. Our ability to transcend matter via intellection indicates that our
existence itself might transcend our death; for Augustine and later adherents
of (increasingly complex) illuminationist theories, the soul’s ability to grasp
eternal, unchanging truths indicates that, like other intellective beings (such
as angels and the celestial spheres), human souls exist forever once they are
created by God.5 Aristotelians disagreed about the mechanics of human
cognition, but they agreed that the soul’s ability to grasp immaterial truths
demonstrates that the soul itself was the sort of being whose existence (esse)
transcends matter and thus could continue to exist in separation from the
matter of which it was the form.6
At the same time, the fact that we die at all—unlike other intellective
beings—raises worries about our persistence. These worries are
compounded by the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body:
philosophical arguments for the immortality of the soul stretch back before
Plato, but the Christian insistence that the soul would not only continue to
exist after death but would also be rejoined to a numerically identical and
incorruptible version of our earthly body puts serious constraints on
medieval accounts of our post-mortem possibilities.7
To vastly oversimplify matters in ways that will be helpful for what
follows, two main camps of explanation form in response to these issues: one
is indebted more to the Platonic tradition, the other to the Aristotelian
tradition. The main problem for medieval Platonists—who tended to
understand the soul as a substance in its own right—lies not in accounting
for the survival of our souls but in providing any motivation at all for the
soul’s continued connection to a material body in the afterlife. The main
problem for Aristotelians, in contrast, lies in explaining how the rational soul
—understood in hylomorphic terms as the substantial form of a material
body—could, first, survive the death of that body and, second, survive it in a
way that grounds our continued identity even when joined to the body again
at the final resurrection.
If the soul is understood primarily as a substance in its own right,
accounting for the soul’s persistence at the death of the human body poses no
real problem. Substances are exactly the sorts of things that have independent
existence, and both the soul’s immateriality and its intellective nature put it in
the same category as incorruptible and immortal substances such as the
angels. This view also avoids worries about the continued identity of the
human person through death and resurrection, since the person is identified
with the soul that persists through these changes. The main problem for
Platonic traditions arises from the doctrine of the bodily resurrection and its
implication that the unity of soul and body is somehow essential for our
continued survival in the afterlife. The doctrine states that our bodies will be
raised incorruptible and that we will continue forever as physical and not
merely spiritual beings—but why bother with bodies if we survive just in
virtue of our soul’s survival? Bodies seem at the very least to be an
unnecessary addition and (as the Phaedo famously argues) might even
endanger our quest to reach our final end. If the soul is a substance in its own
right, it’s unclear how soul and body together would make up a human being
that is a genuine unity, or what role our bodies would play in our continued
existence in the afterlife.
If the soul is understood primarily as the substantial form of the body, on
the other hand, explaining the unity of the human being doesn’t pose a serious
problem. On this view, popular among Aristotelian-influenced figures (most
notably, Thomas Aquinas), human beings are composites of matter and form.
The rational soul functions as the substantial form that structures matter and
makes the human being the thing that it is, but there is only one substance on
the table, so to speak: the human being.8 This view also provides
philosophical motivation for the doctrine of the bodily resurrection, since the
body is an essential component of the human being and needs to be present
for you to be present in the afterlife. The importance of the body raises issues
of persistence and identity for this view, however. For one thing, how can a
substantial form continue to exist in separation from the matter/body of which
it is the form?9 For another, even if we grant that the rational soul survives
the death of the body (in virtue of its intellective nature), this account faces
further puzzles about personal identity through death and the bodily
resurrection. Either the human being ceases to exist at the death of the body,
in which case it’s difficult to explain how the human being who is
resurrected can be numerically the same as the one who dies, or the human
being persists in virtue of the persistence of the rational soul, in which case
this view picks up the problems associated with Platonism that are
mentioned above.10
For our purposes, we can grant that the soul survives the death of the body
and that there is a coherent story to tell about both the unity and the continued
identity of the resurrected human being. The primary reason to sketch these
views and highlight these puzzles is to provide the general framework—
complete with internal and external tensions—within which medieval figures
in the Rome-based Christian tradition speculate about the phenomenology of
immortality.

6.2 Transcending Matter, Becoming God

The majority of extant medieval contemplative literature originates from

outside the university system and remains largely overlooked by
contemporary philosophers. Yet this literature provides a wealth of views
about the ultimate goal of life and our experience of it. As we’ve seen in
Sections 1.2, 2.3.1, 3.2, and 5.2.1, some figures (such as Marguerite Porete,
Meister Eckhart, and Johannes Tauler) portray our final end as a ‘surrender
of self’—an apophatic loss of individual experience as the soul empties
itself to ‘become God’—whereas, as we’ve seen in Sections 1.3, 2.3.2, 3.3,
and 5.2.1, other figures (such as Hadewijch, Angela of Foligno, Jan van
Ruusbroec, and Julian of Norwich) describe our final end in terms of a
‘personal distinction within unity’ that fulfills rather than annihilates the self.
In this section, I address self-abnegating conceptions of our final end; in
Section 6.3, I turn to self-preserving accounts.
As discussed in Section 1.2, apophaticism is the view that human
language and thought cannot capture Divine Truth in any deep or meaningful
way; apophatic mysticism applies this belief to unmediated experiences of
the Divine.11 The fourteenth-century Franciscan tertiary Angela of Foligno,
for instance, reports that, “when I return to myself after perceiving these
divine secrets…and speak entirely from outside the experience, I say words
that come nowhere near describing the divine workings that are produced in
my soul. My statements about them ruin the reality they represent.”12 If we
characterize mystical experiences generally as inherently phenomenological
(“concerning individual felt experience in addition to systems of knowledge
or belief”13) and transcendent (“involving an encounter—whether direct or
mediated, transformatively powerful or paradoxically everyday—with
God”), as I think we should, then we can think of the apophatic tradition as
further characterizing the content of those experiences as inherently
inexpressible. This characterization might make apophatic texts seem like a
nonstarter for medieval views of immortality, but in fact they frequently
contain detailed instructions for attaining the ineffable union that those who
have experienced a taste of can talk around if not about.
A central theme in apophatic mysticism is that reaching our final end
requires moving through various stages of self-abnegation. Medieval
apophatic mysticism’s roots in Platonism and Neoplatonism mean that its
proponents often use the language of ‘ascent’ or ‘grades’ or ‘stages’ to
characterize the contemplative life’s progression. In her Mirror of Simple
Souls, for instance, Marguerite Porete describes seven distinct stages that
culminate in radical self-annihilation. In the final stage, the Loving Soul loses
herself in God to the point where “He is, and she is not,” for “He is sufficient
of Himself,” while she is “nothing in such a One.”14 According to Porete, in
this state (available only to the ‘noble soul’) it as if God had never created
the Soul in the first place: “the Soul is stripped of all things because she is
without existence, where she was before she was created.” The annihilated
soul has no sense of individuality or self; it transcends the experience of
physicality altogether. (As Barbara Newman notes in her discussion of
Porete’s theory, “In this dissolution of the ego no room remains for the body:
even the physical humanity of Christ is no longer cherished by the free
soul.”15)
The idea that our final end involves literally ‘self-less’ union with God is
not unique to Porete, although she is one of this theory’s most radical
defenders. Meister Eckhart also repeatedly counsels his disciples to strive
for detachment, not just from worldly goods but also from any sort of
attachment to the self. This process is portrayed as both ongoing and
essential: “You should know that there was never any man in this life who
forsook himself so much that he could not still find more in himself to
forsake.…But as much as you go out in forsaking all things, by so much,
neither less nor more, does God go in.”16 Emptying oneself allows God to
fill the void and, thus, facilitates mystical union. Reaching our ultimate end
involves more than just detachment, however: it involves self-annihilation.
“After detachment is complete,” Eckhart says, “There is still one work that
remains proper and his own, and that is annihilation of self.”17
Eckhart and Porete both motivate the work of self-abnegation by appeal to
our final end. For Porete, our final end is Love, for Love is God, and Love is
the only thing that remains in the annihilated soul.18 For Eckhart, our final end
is found in the “hidden darkness of the eternal divinity.” This darkness “is
unknown, and it was never known, and it will never be known. God remains
there within himself, unknown.”19 God is not only beyond knowledge for
Eckhart—God is beyond being itself. The belief that one has achieved any
sort of knowledge or understanding of the divine is itself an indication that
one has further to go on the path to genuine union with God.
What proceeds from this total self-abnegation is a state in which the
human being’s will is subsumed in God’s. In this state, no sense or
experience of individuality remains in which the person could take pride, or
for which she could claim responsibility: “Perfect humility proceeds from
annihilation of self.”20 In the words of Eckhart’s follower and fellow
Dominican, the fourteenth-century Johannes Tauler, “Our Lord says: ‘One
thing is necessary.’ What is this one thing that is necessary? The one thing is
that you know your own nothingness—that is what is yours, what you are, and
who are you from yourself.”21 This call to nothingness also features in the
climax of the Sister Catherine treatise, written by an anonymous follower of
Eckhart in the fourteenth century. After experiencing a mystic death, Sister
Catherine rises and announces to her former confessor, “Rejoice with me, I
am become God!” Catherine is not here claiming divinity for herself with this
startling announcement; rather, the claim is meant to indicate that Catherine’s
self-annihilation is complete; God is there because Catherine is not.22
Whether or not the self-annihilation advocated in these passages is
ontological, epistemological, or ‘merely’ phenomenological is impossible to
determine from the texts themselves, which so frequently appeal to the
inadequacy of words to express the realities involved. For our purposes
here, this question is also moot: our focus is medieval apophatic views about
the experience of immortality and the afterlife, and what we’ve seen makes it
clear that according to this tradition, the experience of our final end is
indistinguishable from God’s. Regardless of the existential status of our souls
and/or bodies, our first-person standpoint and narrative sense of self are
extinguished; “our” experience of immortality on this view is nothing more or
less than God’s own experience of eternity. As Porete writes of this stage,
“And so nothing is, except He who is, who sees Himself in such being by His
Divine Majesty through the transformation of love by the goodness poured
out and placed in her. And thus also He sees Himself of Himself in such a
creature, without appropriating anything from the creature. All is properly
His own, and His own proper Self.”23
Phrased this baldly, it’s easy to see why this version of apophatic
mysticism was often seen as falling outside Christian orthodoxy, for the sort
of union it advocates with the divine blurs the Creator/created distinction to
the point of erasure. Indeed, both Porete’s and Eckhart’s views underwent
extensive doctrinal examination by the Inquisition, and both figures were
condemned: Porete to the flames on June 1, 1310, and Eckhart posthumously
on March 27, 1329. (The fact that the Pope took the trouble to issue an
official condemnation of Eckhart’s views after his death indicates the level
of official ecclesiastical concern about them.24)
Other less extreme versions of medieval apophaticism exist, but they
share the belief that our final end involves transcending individual human
experiences—particularly experiences that involve embodied sensations.
Strongly influenced by Platonist prejudices against matter, apophatic texts
such as Walter Hilton’s The Scale of Perfection lay out detailed procedures
for dealing with and overcoming attachment to the material world, including
the need to move beyond ‘false’ mystical experiences that involve the body,
such as “sounding of the ear, or savoring in the mouth, or smelling at the
nose, or else any perceptible heat as if it were fire, glowing and warming the
breast.”25 In this, they affirm Eckhart, who repeatedly counseled his disciples
that part of the process of detachment from self was detachment from sensory
experiences, “tartly condemning those who want to see God with the same
eyes with which they behold a cow.”26 The anonymous Middle English
Cloud of Unknowing also advises us to move beyond consideration of
created things—up to and including ourselves:
So crush every thought of and feeling for every creature, especially thoughts and feelings for
yourself. That’s the linchpin. Your awareness of everything else is contingent on your awareness
of yourself. Your reward for forgetting yourself is that you can then forget all other creatures
 easily. So try losing your self-consciousness. Test my advice, and you’ll discover something
remarkable. When you succeed in forgetting all creatures and their works and even your own
life and all you’ve done, you will be left alone with God to experience a stark awareness of your
own existence. But even this must go. Yes, you must lose the naked feeling of who you are. It
must be destroyed, if you wish to experience the perfection of contemplation, or love.27

A conception of the final end of human life as selfless union with God
constitutes one end of the medieval ‘experiential continuum of
immortality’—namely, immortality understood as endless undifferentiated
experience of the divine and/or loss of any sort of individuated conscious
experience whatsoever. (Not surprisingly, given the phenomenological loss
of self to which this tradition aspires, the prospect of the bodily resurrection
or continued physical existence in the afterlife is not a subject of much
discussion.) In Section 6.3 I examine the other end of this continuum: union
with God that involves not self-annihilation but self-fulfillment, where the
self is taken to include body as well as soul.

6.3 Embodied Immortal Experience

In contrast to the annihilative understanding of our final end, most medieval

accounts of immortality and the afterlife include expectations not only for
individual conscious experiences but for individual embodied experiences.
The doctrine of the bodily resurrection maintains that we are resurrected
physically at the Last Judgment and possess everlasting, incorruptible bodies
in the afterlife. Although (as we saw in Subsection 6.1) this doctrine
generates a number of metaphysical questions, it also supports a picture of
the afterlife that resonates deeply with a number of thirteenth–fourteenth-
century contemplatives who stress the importance of the Incarnation.
On this view, Christ did not just become human; Christ remains human,
and Christ’s ascension into heaven was bodily as well as spiritual, assuring
us that our immortal existence will not be that of disembodied angels but that
of flesh and blood creatures—albeit flesh and blood that have been
transformed into incorruptibility.28 Christ’s current heavenly status thus
becomes a subject of frequent contemplative attention and is seen as
prefiguring our own experience of heaven. Mechthild of Magdeburg, for
instance, writes in The Flowing Light of the Godhead that, “When I reflect
that divine nature now includes bone and flesh, body and soul, then I become
elated in great joy, far beyond what I am worth.…The soul with its flesh is
mistress of the house in heaven, sits next to the eternal Master of the house,
and is most like him.”29 When Mechthild goes on to describe our immortal
existence in both spiritual and bodily terms—“There, eye reflects in eye,
spirit flows in spirit, there, hand touches hand, there, mouth speaks to mouth,
and there, heart greets heart”—she is not speaking metaphorically.
Reference to Christ’s resurrected body and its implications for our own
experience of the afterlife appear in any number of contemplative texts at this
time, crossing geographical regions and religious orders. In Catherine of
Siena’s Dialogue, for instance, God reminds her: “I have told you of the
good the glorified body will have in the glorified humanity of my only-
begotten Son, and this is the guarantee of your own resurrection.”30 Not only
is Christ’s resurrection a promise of our future resurrection, it is also the
model. As the passage continues, “You will all be made like him in joy and
gladness; eye for eye, hand for hand, your whole bodies will be made like
the body of the Word my Son. You will live in him as you live in me, for he is
one with me. But your bodily eyes, as I have told you, will delight in the
glorified humanity of the Word.” (See Figure 6.1, which depicts the joy of the
resurrected greeting each other in Paradise.)
Figure 6.1 The Last Judgment, detail of Paradise, Giovanni di Paolo,
c.1460–5, Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena.

The humanity of Christ also plays an important role in the mystical

experiences of Angela of Foligno, a late-thirteenth-century Franciscan
tertiary and influential mystic. Angela speaks often of the Second Person of
the Trinity as the “God-man” as a way of emphasizing Christ’s two natures:
human and divine. These two natures feature in the two sorts of mystical
union Angela reports as well. The first involves Christ’s humanity. After one
experience, for instance, where she “saw and felt that Christ was within me,
embracing my soul with the very arm with which he was crucified,” Angela
reports that she is filled with joy and now understands what “this man,
namely Christ, is like in heaven, that is to say, how we will see that through
him our flesh is made one with God.”31 Again, meditation on Christ’s
continued humanity in heaven makes Angela stress it is our flesh as well as
our soul that is made one with God in the life to come.
Catherine of Siena makes a similar point, writing: “When my Son was
lifted up on the wood of the most holy cross, he did not cut off his divinity
from the lowly earth of your humanity. So, though he was raised so high, he
was not raised off the earth. In fact, his divinity is kneaded into the clay of
your humanity like one bread.”32 Again, Christ’s status as fully human and
fully divine offers us a way of understanding how our experience of
immortality could involve embodied spirituality. As we saw in Section 4.2,
the wildly popular devotional genre of meditations in the later Middle Ages
encourages people to imagine themselves physically present at key moments
of Christ’s life and to cultivate emotions appropriate to their participation in
those scenes (wonder at the birth of Jesus; anger at his betrayal by Judas;
sympathy for Mary watching her son’s execution, etc.). The purpose of
meditating in this way is to generate a vivid sense of human connection and a
more passionate love for God. Rather than counseling practitioners to
withdraw from one’s attachment to the self and its experiences, this tradition
advocates ‘leaning in’ to certain affective experiences as a way of
developing an appropriate sense of self in relation to God.
Strong emotion was seen in this tradition as opening the subject to the
divine presence, as were visions, auditions, smellings, and tastings. As God
assures Margaret Ebner, a fourteenth-century German Dominican, “I am no
robber of the senses, I am the enlightener of the senses.”33 It’s not clear from
this passage whether Ebner is referring here to the ‘inner’ or the ‘outer’
senses, but since the apophatic tradition calls for transcending both, the claim
that God enlightens the senses is enough to distinguish this view from
apophaticism.34 Furthermore, the inner and outer senses were seen as
intrinsically connected, and both the mystical experiences these
contemplatives report and the language they use to describe them often move
seamlessly from one to the other, as when Mechthild of Magdeburg writes, “I
do not know how to write, nor can I, unless I see with the eyes of my soul
and hear with the ears of my eternal spirit and feel in all the parts of my body
the power of the Holy Spirit.”35 Many of the contemplatives in this movement
also frequently describe mystic union in terms of self-loss and dissolution,
but unlike figures in the apophatic movement they do so without downplaying
or denigrating the significance of affective and embodied unitive
experiences.
This acceptance of embodied mystical states, I would argue, actually
constitutes the most important distinction between the apophatic and affective
mindset. Figures like Porete, Eckhart, and Walter Hilton acknowledge that
unusual embodied states such as visions and auditions occur regularly in the
contemplative life, but they portray them as experiences to be ignored or
suspicious of, and as part of a stage that needs to be moved past. In contrast,
other figures such as Angela of Foligno and Hadewijch, both of whom are
often labeled ‘apophatic mystics,’ regularly describe both experiences of
self-loss and self-fulfillment in mystical union.36
In a letter to a fellow beguine, for instance, Hadewijch describes
experience of mystical union with God both in terms of a loss of self via
complete intermingling and in terms of an eternal self-awareness that
includes physicality as well as spirituality:
Where the abyss of his wisdom is, God will teach you what he is, and with what wondrous
sweetness the loved one and the Beloved dwell one in the other, and how they penetrate each
other in a way that neither of the two distinguishes himself from the other. But they abide in one
another in fruition, mouth in mouth, heart in heart, body in body, and soul in soul, while one sweet
divine nature flows through both and they are both one thing through each other, but at the same
time remain two different selves—yes, and remain so forever.37

The portrayal of the “one flesh” scriptural metaphor for marriage here is
striking; in speaking of God and the human being (God’s Beloved) in these
intimate terms, Hadewijch stresses the beauty of both spiritual and physical
union.38
Importantly, this sort of unitive mystical experience is also what we are
told we will enjoy in the life to come. Catherine of Siena, for instance, is
told by God that the upward spiral of love and knowledge in which souls are
carried off in the fire of God’s charity culminates in “that eternal vision of
me in which they will see and taste me in truth when soul is separated from
body [i.e., after death]. This is the superb state in which the soul even while
still mortal shares the enjoyment of the immortals.”39 Angela of Foligno, for
instance, reports after a mystical experience of ‘unspeakable good’ that “This
is the same good and none other than that which the saints enjoy in eternal
life, but there the experience of it is different. In eternal life, the least saint
has more of it than can be given to a soul in this life before the death of the
body.”40 There is sometimes self-loss or being ‘taken out of’ oneself in this
tradition, but there is also always a return to oneself. Angela also describes
moving between profoundly apophatic experiences and deeply personal
experiences that involve the embodied Christ. In the following passage, she
explains how, as an experience of unspeakable ‘darkness’ and
indistinguishable union ebbs away, she still remains intimately connected
with the God-man:
When I am in that darkness I do not remember anything about anything human, or the God-man,
or anything which has a form. Nevertheless, I see all and I see nothing. As what I have spoken
of withdraws and stays with me, I see the God-man. He draws my soul with great gentleness,
and he sometimes says to me: “You are I, and I am you.” I see, then, those eyes and that face so
gracious and attractive as he leans to embrace me.41

Here again we see the sort of mystical identification of human being with
God discussed in Section 6.2: “You are I, and I am you.” Yet here it appears
in a setting in which the second person of the Trinity is speaking those words
to Angela with a human mouth and looking at her with human eyes, after her
experience of darkness, not during it.
Angela immediately goes on to explain how her two sorts of mystical
experiences are related to each other:
In short, what proceeds from those eyes and that face is what I said that I saw in that previous
darkness which comes from within, and which delights me so that I can say nothing about it.
When I am in the God-man my soul is alive. And I am in the God-man much more than in the
other vision of seeing God with darkness. The soul is alive in that vision concerning the God-man.
The vision with darkness, however, draws me so much more that there is no comparison. On the
other hand, I am in the God-man almost continually. It began in this continual fashion on a certain
occasion when I was given the assurance that there was no intermediary between God and
myself. Since this time there has not been a day or night in which I did not continually experience
this joy of the humanity of Christ.42

It is hardly obvious how to read the claims made here—and, indeed, we’ve
already seen Angela herself exclaim how poorly words capture her
experiences. At the same time, although she says that she vastly prefers her
experience of God’s inexpressible darkness, her union with the God-man is
already unmediated, and there is no indication that her experience of Christ’s
humanity is anything but an appropriate source of delight.
One reason this point is worth stressing is that the primary motivation for
focusing on Christ’s humanity within the affective tradition was precisely to
counter the sort of gnostic tendencies which run through apophaticism. Rather
than hoping to move beyond contemplation of Christ’s humanity to an
experience of divinity, the affective movement saw human beings as most
closely joined with Christ’s divinity through his corporeity.
 This ‘both/and’ approach has been all-too-frequently overlooked in
philosophical discussions of mysticism, but it proves crucial for
understanding medieval expectations for immortality. The following vision
reported by Hadewijch, for instance, beautifully captures this ‘both/and’
depiction of mystical union. First, she describes Christ as satisfying the
“desire of my heart and my humanity” via a physical embrace during the
celebration of the Eucharist:
With that he came in the form and clothing of a Man, as he was on the day when he gave us his
Body for the first time; looking like a Human Being and a Man, wonderful and beautiful, and with
glorious face, he came to me as humbly as anyone who wholly belongs to another. Then he gave
himself to me in the shape of the Sacrament, in its outward form, as the custom is; and then he
gave me to drink from the chalice, in form and taste, as the custom is. After that he came
himself to me, took me entirely in his arms, and pressed me to him; and all my members felt his
in full felicity, in accordance with the desire of my heart and my humanity. So I was outwardly
satisfied and fully transported.43

Here, Christ is repeatedly referred to as a Man, and as such speaks to

Hadewijch’s human nature.
After this, however, Christ “dissolves” so that they became “one without
difference”—an experience Hadewijch relates to the physical mystery of the
Eucharist (via the metaphor of digestion): “So can the Beloved, with the
loved one, each wholly receive the other in full satisfaction of the sight, the
hearing, and the passing away of the one in the other.” This ‘passing away’
then turns into an apophatic experience of complete self-loss: “After that I
remained in a passing away in my Beloved, so that I wholly melted away in
him and nothing any longer remained of myself; and I was changed and taken
up in spirit, and there it was shown me concerning such hours.”44 As with
Angela of Foligno and Catherine of Siena, embodied experience of Christ’s
humanity forms a crucial component of Hadewijch’s mystical union with
God. It’s not self-annihilation as opposed to affective experience on this
view, but something much more complex—and complex in a way that
recognizes the importance of body as well as soul.
As Julian of Norwich writes, using a careful combination of physical and
spiritual images,
We will long for our Beloved until the day we die. And on that day we will merge with our
Beloved, knowing ourselves clearly and possessing God completely. We will be endlessly hidden
in God, seeing him truly and touching him fully, spiritually hearing him, deliciously smelling him,
and sweetly tasting him. Ultimately, we shall see God face-to-face, and he will be completely
 familiar when we meet him. Then the created creature shall fully behold God her Creator and
eternally contemplate him.45

We see here again the language of merging mixed with the language of
continued identity—and it is also significant that Julian portrays this
everlasting union with God as not just preserving but perfecting self-
knowledge. (For more on self-knowledge in the contemplative tradition, see
Chapter 2.)
In general, the thirteenth–fourteenth-century emphasis on the Incarnation
and Christ’s humanity (including the fact that Christ was believed to have
ascended physically into heaven, where he waits for the rest of us to join
him) provided an embodied model of union with God that was
enthusiastically explored by contemplatives from a wide variety of
backgrounds. If we think of apophaticism’s emphasis on phenomenological
de-emphasis or erasure as one endpoint of the experiential continuum of
immortality, then, affectivism’s emphasis on embodied fulfillment can be
seen as the other endpoint. In Section 6.4 I discuss how scholastic views map
onto this continuum; perhaps surprisingly, the most relevant factor for where
a figure falls is not religious affiliation (that is, whether the author is
Carthusian, Dominican, or Franciscan, etc.) but, rather, whether the body is
seen more as hindering or helping us connect with God.

6.4 Intellective Union and the Scholastic Tradition

We’ve seen that medieval expectations of immortality range widely, from

loss of individual experience in union with God to a self-preserving
connection with God; to demonstrate the breadth of this range, I have drawn
in Sections 6.2 and 6.3 on contemplative literature from a variety of literary
genres and languages. In this final section I discuss where on this continuum
to place two major figures in the Latin scholastic tradition: Robert
Grosseteste and Thomas Aquinas. One common way of dividing up
scholastic views of the afterlife is according to whether they stress the
primacy of intellect or will in our final end—that is, whether the view
maintains that we will be united with God via knowledge first and foremost
or via love. When it comes to our experience of the afterlife, however, this
distinction proves much less helpful, for an emphasis on intellective vs.
volitional aspects of eternal union turns out not to map neatly onto the
experiential continuum discussed above. What does help situate scholastic
(and contemplative) accounts along that continuum, however, are the author’s
attitudes towards embodiment and the nature of union with God more
generally.
Throughout this book (see particularly Chapter 4), for instance, we have
encountered contemplatives who agree that love is our final end, but who
nevertheless present widely divergent conceptions of our experience of that
final end. Marguerite Porete stresses the importance of total self-annihilation
in Love, whereas Hadewijch also emphasizes love’s unifying power, but in
such a manner that God and the Beloved “remain two different selves—yes,
and remain so forever.” Mechthild of Magdeburg in turn sees our final end as
loving union with God, but she rejoices in the thought that the soul “with its
flesh” will literally sit next to the resurrected Christ). Clearly, emphasis on
the will and love does not lead to one particular view of our experience of
immortality.
In the remainder of this section I show that an emphasis on intellective
union also allows for a range of different expectations of immortality,
focusing on the accounts of Robert Grosseteste and Thomas Aquinas. The
human desire for knowledge runs throughout medieval discussions of
immortality. In fact, the ‘naturalness’ of our desire for both abstract
knowledge and immortality is appealed to by Augustinian illuminationists,
Neoplatonists, and Aristotelians alike as an indication that human beings are
meant for more than just material existence. Yet, to return to one of the central
questions from Section 6.1, are we immaterial souls who need to transcend
our corrupt bodies, or are those bodies an integral part of who we are?

6.4.1 Robert Grosseteste

An important response to this question appears in Robert Grosseteste’s

early-thirteenth-century commentary on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics—a
work that is especially significant because it represents the Latin university
system’s first attempt to address Aristotle’s system in what had been largely
a Platonic world. Rather than take sides in what in the ensuing century
becomes a highly acrimonious debate, Grosseteste’s central project is
synthetic in nature; he incorporates Platonic ideas, Neoplatonic emanation,
Aristotelian universals, and divine illumination into his complex framework.
Although how best to understand details of the resulting framework remains
controversial, what is clear is that on his view the highest forms of cognition
involve separation from matter.46 In his own words, “Knowledge is most
complete in these things that lack senses.”47
Grosseteste, a master at Oxford University, generally applies an
Aristotelian epistemic framework to human cognition here on earth. His
discussions of the levels of cognition, however, emphasize that cognition
which depends on sense perception and phantasms (mental images that stored
in the imaginations), is the lowest sort. The higher the intellect, the less
dependent on the senses and phantasms it is. Employing Platonist language of
purity, Grosseteste explains that “for the intellect that is pure and separated
from phantasms—able to contemplate the first light, which is the first cause
—the principles of cognizing are the uncreated ideas (rationes) of things that
exist from eternity in the first cause.”48 In fact, “when the pure intellect is
able to fix its sight on them, it cognizes created things in them as truly and
clearly as possible—and not only created things, but also the first light itself
in which it cognizes other things.”49 As becomes clear through the
commentary, Grosseteste believes that we can gain true knowledge of God
only when we have separated our intellects completely from their
dependence on the body and its phantasms—that is, only after death.
There is no mention of a positive role for the body here. Indeed, although
we appear to retain a sense of individuality in the afterlife on this view, it is
not because we are essentially embodied. We must draw our mental gaze
away from corporeal matters, for “divine things are more visible to the
mind’s vision that is healthy and not clouded by phantasms.” Grosseteste
goes so far as to refer to the mind’s vision, “while we are burdened by the
weight of the corrupt body and the love of corporeal things,” as unhealthy.50
Our love for the material world is essentially a sickness that interferes with
our ability to know both abstract truths (for which Grosseteste’s favorite
example is mathematics) and God. “The reason why the soul’s sight is
clouded by the weight of the corrupt body,” he writes, “Is that the affection
and vision (affectus et aspectus) of the soul are not distinct, and the soul
attains its vision only by means of that by which it attains its affection or its
love.”51 So long as the soul loves the body and its “enticements,” the soul’s
vision is turned away from the source of its natural light. Our goal as human
beings is to turn our love towards God, so that our minds can follow suit.
The vision of immortality that emerges from Grosseteste, then, is one in
which our connection with physicality is tenuous at best. If (as Christian
doctrine maintains) we spend the afterlife joined to incorruptible bodies,
those bodies appear to play no role in our experience of our final end.
Grosseteste’s afterlife is one of Platonic intellective fulfillment, which in
turn fulfills our wills as well. We may retain individual existence, but our
primary experience of that individuality will come via our experience of God
as our First and Final Cause.

6.4.2 Thomas Aquinas

Robert Grosseteste’s view is significant because it represents an early

attempt in the Latin West to reconcile Aristotelian with Platonic intuitions;
the resulting account, however, takes a decidedly Platonist perspective on the
body. Thomas Aquinas, on the other hand, is known for advocating a
thoroughly hylomorphic, Aristotelian account of human nature. On his view,
the human being is a composite of form and matter, and cognition is an
activity that requires us to use our bodies as well as our rational capacities.
To make an extremely complicated story short, human beings have the
weakest intellects in the hierarchy of being,52 and so the typical process of
human cognition moves first from sense experience to phantasms, and then
from phantasms to intelligible species (the proper objects of abstract
thought). Furthermore, in this life, any time we’re thinking, our intellects must
refer back to the phantasms that ground the intelligible species that serve as
the objects of our thought.
This general account of cognition makes it look as though Aquinas’s
account of immortality should be robustly embodied, with us using our
glorified sense perception as well as our rational capacities to better know
and love God. Aquinas’s actual depiction of our final end, however,
emphasizes its intellectual, contemplative nature and explicitly denies that
sense perception plays a role in that act of contemplation. As he writes in his
Treatise on Happiness in the Summa theologiae, “In that perfect happiness in
heaven to which we look forward…the operation by which the human mind
is joined to God will not depend on the senses.”53 The reason for this is that
Aquinas believes that the primary activity of the life to come is direct
(unmediated) contemplation of God’s essence—an activity we share with
God and the angels, who are wholly immaterial. In this life, we require
mutable bodies for gathering information from the world around us; in the life
to come, we will still have sense perception, but there will be no need for
it.54 Human beings attain the beatific vision only when God gives us his
essence as intelligible form and then illuminates our intellects so we are
capable of cognizing it to the degree that we love it.55 God is the First and
the Final Cause in this cognitive story: “In such a vision, the divine essence
must be both what is seen and that by which it is seen.”56
Our experience of immortality on Aquinas’s view differs radically from
our experience of mortal life, for it also involves a drastic shift in our
experience of time. In this life, human beings employ discursive reasoning,
moving from premise to premise to conclusion, rather than instantly
comprehending an argument in its entirety. Aquinas argues that in the life to
come, however, we will exist in a state of perfection in which motion ceases:
“Each thing rests when it reaches its ultimate end, since all motion is for the
sake of acquiring that end, and the ultimate end of the intellect is vision of the
divine substance, as was shown above. Therefore, the intellect which is
seeing the divine substance does not move from one intelligible thing to
another.”57 Our contemplation of God’s eternal and unchanging essence is
“one continuous and sempiternal activity.”58
Aquinas is also clear, however, that our rational souls will be joined to
resurrected material bodies, which will be “brighter, more firmly
impassible, much more agile, and with a more perfect dignity of nature.”59
These bodies are glorified by sharing in the perfect happiness our souls
receive from their contemplation of God’s essence. In fact, Aquinas claims,
“there will be such an outflow to the body and the bodily senses from the
happiness of the soul that they will be perfected in their operations.”60 The
beatific vision is everlasting and unchanging, and our experience of it will be
likewise. Whatever information the sense might provide us with will at best
enhance that vision, rather than forming any constituent part of it.
Aquinas’s intellectivist view of the phenomenology of immortality, then,
significantly downplays the role of our bodies and our senses in comparison
to some of his contemporaries’ contemplative views. At the same time,
Aquinas does not depict our bodies as a burden we need to transcend or as
weighing down our intellects, as Grosseteste does. Intellectivist accounts of
union with God thus also fall on different points along the experiential
continuum. Again, it seems that what’s most relevant for medieval
expectations of immortality is not a stress on love versus knowledge but,
rather, attitudes towards the body and its connection (or lack thereof) to
experiences of God: Platonist inclinations push towards self-abnegation in
union with a God perhaps beyond being itself; emphasis on our connection to
God via Christ’s humanity inclines towards mystical union with physical and
emotional as well as intellective and volitional components.

6.5 Conclusion

Traditionally, philosophical discussions of immortality in the Middle Ages

have focused on scholastic arguments for and against the survival of the
rational soul and questions of personal identity through death and the bodily
resurrection. These views are important and certainly worthy of attention, but
even the brief overview of contemplative positions I have been able to
provide in this chapter shows that scholastic accounts fall far short of
representing the full range of medieval thoughts about immortality and the
afterlife—even just in the Rome-based Christian tradition, and even just in
the thirteenth–fifteenth centuries. My hope is that the ‘experiential continuum
of immortality’ I have presented and motivated here will provide a useful
framework for more holistic understandings of medieval views on
immortality and the afterlife—a framework that should also prove of use to
philosophers of mind, philosophers of religion, theologians, and scholars of
the afterlife more generally.

1 As I discuss in “I See Dead People: Disembodied Souls and Aquinas’s ‘Two-Person’ Problem,”
in Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy Vol. 2, pp. 25–45, this story in particular was understood as
describing real events, not as a parable or metaphor.
2 Standard answers to these two questions are “As long as God deems appropriate” and “33.”
There are far more scholastic texts dealing with our embodied resurrected state than most people
realize. For a book-length history of this tradition (and its predecessors), see Caroline Walker Bynum’s
The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1995).
 3 For a book-length discussion of the status of the rational soul at this time, see Richard C. Dales’s
The Problem of the Rational Soul in the Thirteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1995). Anton Pegis’s St.
Thomas and the Problem of the Soul in the Thirteenth Century (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of
Mediaeval Studies, 1934) is a classic treatment of the topic with special attention on Thomas Aquinas.
4 The question of celestial intelligences—the incorruptible ‘heavenly bodies’—was trickier. See,
e.g., Steven Marrone’s “From Gundisalvus to Bonaventure: Intellect and Intelligences in the Late
Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Centuries,” in Intellect et imagination dans la philosophie médiévale,
ed. M. C. Pacheco and J. F. Meirinhos (Brepols: Turnhout, 2006), II: pp. 1071–81; and Richard C.
Dales’s “The De-Animation of the Heavens in the Middle Ages,” Journal of the History of Ideas 41/4
(1980), pp. 531–50.
5 See Steven Marrone’s two-volume The Light of thy Countenance: Science and Knowledge of
God in the Thirteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2001) for a comprehensive (if idiosyncratic) study of the
development and decline of theories of illumination.
6 See, e.g., Pegis, St. Thomas and the Problem of the Soul; and Dale, The Problem of the
Rational Soul.
7 The moment of body being reunited with soul was said to happen at the Final or Last Judgment.
8 This doctrine is typically referred to as the unicity of substantial form. For secondary sources that
defend this position, see Van Steenberghen’s Thomas Aquinas and Radical Aristotelianism
(Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1980) and Van Dyke’s “Not Properly a Person: the
Rational Soul and ‘Thomistic Substance Dualism,’” Faith and Philosophy 26/2 (2009) pp. 186–204.
9 This has been a heated subject of debate since Aristotle’s De Anima 3.5 suggested that, if any
part of the soul persisted through the death of the organism of which it was the substantial form, it
would be the intellective part. In the Islamic tradition, this claim famously inspired the doctrine of the
Unity of the Intellect.
10 This problem has received particular attention in Aquinas’s treatment of it, leading people to
divide responses between ‘survivalists,’ who argue that the soul’s survival is sufficient for the survival of
the human being without being numerically identical to the human being, and ‘corruptionists,’ who
maintain that the human being ceases to exist at death. For examples of survivalist readings of Aquinas,
see Jeff Brower’s Aquinas’s Ontology of the Material World: Change, Hylomorphism, and
Material Objects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) and Eleonore Stump’s Aquinas (New York:
Routledge, 2003). For examples of corruptionists, see Patrick Toner’s “St. Thomas Aquinas on the
Problem of Too Many Thinkers,” The Modern Schoolman 89 (2012), 209–22, and my “I See Dead
People: Disembodied Souls and Aquinas’s ‘Two-Person’ Problem,” Oxford Studies in Medieval
Philosophy Vol. 2, ed. R. Pasnau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 25–45.
11 For a detailed treatment of this topic with particular attention paid to Meister Eckhart’s views,
see Denys Turner’s The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995).
12 Angela of Foligno, Memorial IX, p. 214.
13 Both quotes in this paragraph are from Nicholas Watson’s Introduction to The Cambridge
Companion to Medieval English Mysticism, ed. S. Fanous and V. Gillespie (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), p. 1.
14 Marguerite Porete. The Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. E. L. Babinsky (Mahwah: Paulist
Press, 1993), p. 218.
 15 Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), p. 203. For further discussion of Porete’s views,
see also Amy Hollywood’s The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite of
Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995) and Joanne
Robinson’s Nobility and Annihilation in Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2001).
16 Meister Eckhart, Counsel 4, p. 250.
17 Meister Eckhart, Counsel 23, p. 280.
18 “I am God, says Love, for Love is God and God is Love, and this Soul is God by the condition of
Love. I am God by divine nature and this Soul is God by the righteousness of Love. Thus, this precious
beloved of mine…is transformed into me.” Mirror of Simple Souls, ch. 21, p. 104. (The original French
title of the treatise is Le Mirouer des simples âmes anieéanties et qui seulement demeurent en
vouloir et désir d’amour.)
19 As quoted in McGinn, Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (vol. 4 of The Presence of
God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 2005), p. 142.
20 Meister Eckhart, p. 286.
21 Tauler, V [i.e., Sermon] 45, Die Predigten Taulers, ed. Ferdinand Vetter (Berlin: Wiedmann,
1910; photomechanical reprint 1968), trans. Bernard McGinn.
22 The “Sister Catherine” Treatise, trans. Elvira Borgstädt, in Meister Eckhart: Teacher and
Preacher, ed. B. McGinn, trans. McGinn, F. Tobin, and E. Borgstadt (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press,
1986), p. 358. For a book-length treatment of this topic that focuses particularly on Meister Eckhart, see
Ben Morgan’s On Becoming God: Late Medieval Mysticism and the Modern Western Self (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2013).
23 Mirror, ch. 118, p. 194.
24 A great deal of the Church’s concern about these views stemmed from the way in which they
appeared to undermine Church authority by claiming that laypeople could have a relationship with God
unmediated by priests. Despite official attempts to stamp this idea out, it becomes a cornerstone of later
medieval lay devotional movements and eventually the Protestant Reformation. For more on the politics
of heresy in this period, see R. I. Moore’s The War on Heresy: Faith and Power in Medieval Europe
(London: Profile Books, 2012).
25 Hilton, The Scale of Perfection. Hilton’s target here is Richard Rolle, who in his influential Fire
of Love describes mystical experiences that include a ‘glowing’ or warmth in the breast, a taste of
unimaginable sweetness, and the sound of celestial music; Rolle explicitly understands these embodied
experiences as a foretaste of the life to come.
26 Bernard McGinn, Introduction to Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries,
Treatises, and Defense, ed. E. Colledge, OSA, and B. McGinn (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1981), p. 61.
The sermon referenced is Sermon 16b in Meister Eckhart. Die deutschen Werke, Vol. 1.
Herausgegeben im Auftrage der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (Stuttgart and Berlin: W.
Kohlhammer, 1936–), p. 272.
27 The Cloud of Unknowing: with the Book of Privy Counselling, trans. Carmen Acevedo
Butcher (Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 2009), ch. 43, p. 98.
28 From at least Augustine’s The City of God onward, these heavenly bodies were understood to
possess four new qualities: ‘clarity’ (which includes a certain amount of shininess), ‘agility’ (the ability
to move our bodies instantly and completely at will), ‘impassibility’ (the inability for our bodies to be
injured or suffer pain), and ‘greater dignity of human nature’ (usually understood as our bodies
becoming the best possible versions of themselves). The best literary example I know of for capturing
what these new bodies might be like, from the inside as well as the outside, are the vampires in
Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, particularly Bella’s description of her experience waking up as a
vampire in the second part of the series’ final book, Breaking Dawn.
29 IV.14, Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. Frank Tobin
(Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1998), pp. 157–8.
30 Catherine of Siena: The Dialogue, trans. Suzanne Noffke, OP (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1980),
ch. 41, p. 85.
31 Ch. VI, 4th Supplemental Step, from the Memorial, in Angela of Foligno: Complete Works, p.
175.
32 Dialogue 26, p. 65.
33 Margaret Ebner: Major Works, trans. and ed. Leonard Hindsley (Mahwah: Paulist Press,
1993), p. 100.
34 For more on the inner and outer senses, see Niklaus Largier’s “Inner Senses – Outer Senses:
The Practice of Emotions in Medieval Mysticism,” in Emotions and Sensibilities in the Middle Ages,
ed. C. Jaeger and I. Kasten (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2003), pp. 3–15.
35 The Flowing Light of the Godhead, IV.13, p. 156.
36 The fact that apophatic mystical experiences have generally been portrayed as superior to or
purer than affective and embodied experiences is no doubt part of the motivation for labeling Angela
and Hadewijch as apophatic mystics, as a way of legitimizing their insights; for more on this, see
Chapter 1, particularly Section 1.1.
37 Letter 9, in Hadewijch: The Complete Works. ed. and trans. Mother Columba Hart, OSB
(Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1980), p. 66.
38 As Mary Suydam notes, “There is absolutely no indication, either here or anywhere else in her
writings, that this embodied experience represents a ‘lower’ stage of religious experience” (16); “The
Touch of Satisfaction: Visions and Religious Experience According to Hadewijch of Antwerp,” Journal
of Feminist Studies in Religion 12 (Fall, 1996), pp. 5–27.
39 Dialogue 85, pp. 157–8.
40 Memorial, in Angela of Foligno: Complete Works, trans. Paul Lachance (Mahwah: Paulist
Press, 1993), p. 217.
41 Memorial IX, p. 205.
42 Memorial IX, p. 205.
43 Vision 7, Hadewijch, p. 281.
44 Vision 7, Hadewijch, p. 282.
45 Showings, ch. 43, p. 108. She continues: “No one can see God in this way and survive – not in
moral form. Yet when, in his special grace, he wishes to show himself to us here on earth, he
strengthens the creature beyond her own natural power, and he measures out the revelation according
to his own will, so that she can handle it and it does her the most good.”
46 For discussion of both the controversies involved in interpreting Grosseteste’s position on
universals (with extensive bibliography) and my own interpretation, see my “The Truth, the Whole Truth,
and Nothing but the Truth: Robert Grosseteste on Universals (and the Posterior Analytics),” Journal
of the History of Philosophy 48/2 (2010), pp. 153–70.
47 Commentary on the Posterior Analytics I.14; translation mine. References are to the Latin text
of Pietro Rossi’s critical edition, Commentarius in Posteriorum Analyticorum Libros (Florence: Leo S.
Olschki, 1981).
48 Commentary I.7, pp. 100–6.
49 Commentary I.7, pp. 106–11.
50 Commentary I.17, pp. 353–63.
51 Commentary I.14, pp. 279–86. See ch. 18, conclusion 28, for further discussion about love and
desire moving the soul.
52 See, e.g., the extended discussions of human cognition in comparison to other intellects in
Summa theologiae Ia 84–9, Summa contra gentiles II 94–101, III 37–60, Quaestiones de anima, and
De veritate VIII–X.
53 ST IaIIae 3.3.co. In his early Sentences Commentary, Aquinas mentions our seeing Christ’s
resurrected body and the glorified bodies of the martyrs as enhancing our experience of the Beatific
Vision, but in his later works he omits any reference to this possibility and claims that our vision of God’s
essence will be entirely intellective, rather than also including a literal component. (See, e.g., Summa
contra gentiles III.51.)
54 See also Summa contra gentiles III.62, where Aquinas explains that the enjoyment of the
beatific vision never ends, for our intellects will not tire in their contemplation (with God’s assistance),
“and no act which is carried out through a physical organ coincides with this vision.”
55 We’ve seen this quote from Catherine of Siena’s Dialogue in previous chapters, but her
depiction of the interplay between love and knowledge is worth quoting here again: “I have told you this,
my dearest daughter, to let you know the perfection of this unitive state in which souls are carried off by
the fire of my charity. In that charity, they receive supernatural light, and in that light they love me. For
love follows upon understanding. The more they know, the more they love, and the more they love, the
more they know. Thus each nourishes the other. By this light they reach the eternal vision of me in
which they see and taste me in truth when soul is separated from body.” Dialogue 85, pp. 157–8.
56 Summa contra gentiles III.51.
57 Summa contra gentiles III.60. Aquinas reiterates this point at length in his discussion of peace
in his commentary on the Sermon on the Mount.
58 Summa theologiae IaIIae 3.2.ad4.
59 Summa contra gentiles IV.86. These qualities are possessed only by the bodies of the blessed,
however. The bodies of the damned Aquinas describes as dark, heavy, suffering, and degraded.
60 Summa theologiae IaIIae 3.3.co. As Aquinas clarifies in Summa contra gentiles IV.83,
although we will have bodies and sense perception, “All the occupations of the active life (which seem
ordered to the use of food and sex and those other things that are necessary for corruptible life) will
cease. Only the activity of the contemplative life will remain after the resurrection.”
 Afterword

It is a strange and momentous time to be a medievalist. We are currently

living through what many people are calling “the new Dark Ages,”1 due in
part to the horrific rise of white supremacist groups (many of whom claim to
be drawing inspiration from medieval ideology and practices2) and the
outbreak of a worldwide pandemic which has inspired any number of
references to the Black Death.3 ‘Medieval’ has become a synonym for
backwardness and ignorance, and the Middle Ages an entire millennium of
human experience considered worth noting only as a cautionary tale against
“religious extremism, anti-science sneering, conspiracy theories and ill-
conceived, ragtag, speak-and-pole crusades.”4
This characterization has, for better or worse, inspired a fresh wave of
interest in these so-called Dark Ages—a wave that a host of medievalists are
cresting with their forefingers held high and the words “Well, actually!”
burning on their lips. From Matthew Gabriele and David Perry’s complete
flip of the trope in The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe5 to
Andrew Albin (et al.)’s Whose Middle Ages? Teachable Moments for an
Ill-Used Past,6 new scholarship continues to challenge the idea that the
worst of today’s present mirrors the best of the Middle Ages’ past. This
cutting-edge scholarship brings the rich complexity of the global Middle
Ages to light, whether by drawing attention to the importance of Saharan
Africa for medieval trade (as in Kathleen Bickford Berzock’s Caravans of
Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval
Saharan Africa7), by re-examining accepted meanings of iconography (as
Sara Lipton does in her Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins on Anti-Jewish
Iconography8), or by digging out the medieval roots of contemporary racism
(as in Geraldine Heng’s The Invention of Race in the European Middle
Ages and Cord Whitaker’s Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged
from Medieval Race-Thinking).9
 This book constitutes one very small step in the same direction—that is,
towards a more accurate representation of an intellectual, cultural, political,
and religious landscape that is often maligned and/or dismissed on the basis
of events that didn’t even happen during its thousand-year span. (Witch trials,
for instance, really took off in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—the
period known as the Scientific Revolution, and the scope of legal rights of
women actually became more restricted in France, England, and other
European countries in what’s often called the Enlightenment and following
centuries. Jane Austen’s Mrs. Dashwood and her three girls in Sense and
Sensibility would have had more and better options available to them in the
England of Eleanor of Aquitaine than they did in their own age of
primogeniture and entailed estates.) While many if not most disciplines in the
humanities and liberal arts have spent the past thirty years and more
rediscovering and incorporating the contributions of women to their fields,
this trend is still just beginning to reach ‘mainstream’ philosophy (which is to
say, philosophy as it tends to be understood by academics in philosophy
departments). The idea that women produced work worthy of sustained
philosophical attention is still quite novel to many of my fellow historians of
medieval philosophy, let alone to the general field. (As I note in my Preface,
we were all taught that women simply weren’t allowed to do philosophy in
the Middle Ages!) The fact that this work tends to appear in mystical and
contemplative venues, and the idea that medieval contemplative traditions
generally deserve more philosophical attention that they receive, are also not
yet well appreciated. (Indeed, I hope that my focus on the Rome-based
Christian contemplative tradition of the thirteenth–fifteenth centuries is
enough to motivate others to look more closely at the mystical and
contemplative traditions of other times and other places within the thousand
years we call the medieval period, for there is fascinating work already
being done on the medieval contemplative texts of Islamic, Jewish,
Confucian, Buddhist, and Hindi traditions, and more.)
Let me close, then, by encouraging philosophers to look outside the
scholastic tradition, both to form a more accurate picture of the range of
medieval perspectives on ‘classical’ philosophical issues and to encounter a
fresh set of questions voiced by traditionally marginalized groups. At the
same time, I hope that historians, theologians, art historians, and those
engaged in other disciplines that address the Middle Ages will appreciate the
addition of philosophical perspectives to their conversations and perhaps
even actively seek such perspectives out.
Medieval contemplative philosophy is vibrant, engaged, and surprisingly
relevant to contemporary concerns about how to live. In this book I have
been able only to highlight a few of the figures and ideas in this tradition that
richly repay philosophical attention; my goal has been to provide a variety of
conceptual hooks that allow people within philosophy to connect with
relevant conversations in this tradition, while also giving medievalists in
other disciplines a fresh lens through which to view familiar mystical and
contemplative texts. This is perhaps the first book-length reintegration of the
medieval contemplative tradition into discussions about medieval
philosophy; I am hopeful that it will not be the last.

1 See Petula Dvorak’s “We’re living in the new Dark Ages – and it’s time to turn on the light,”
which appeared in the Washington Post on December 30, 2021 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-
md-va/2021/12/30/dark-ages-medieval-middle-ages/). In his introduction to New Dark Age:
Technology and the End of the Future (New York: Verso Books, 2018), meanwhile, James Bridle
makes explicit reference to the fourteenth-century Cloud of Unknowing.
2 For a refutation of white supremacist claims to medieval backing, see Amy Kaufman and Paul
Sturtevant’s The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2020).
3 The main website for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention attributes both the name
and the practice of quarantine to fourteenth-century efforts “to protect coastal cities from plague
epidemics”: https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/historyquarantine.html.
4 Dvorak, “We’re living in the new Dark Ages”; Dvorak also calls our current economic structure
“feudalism redux” in an approving reference to Joel Kotkin’s 2020 doom-and-gloom-filled book, The
New Feudalism: The Coming Global Return to the Middle Ages. See also Joel Kotkin’s “The new
Dark Ages: The woke assault on Western civilisation is taking us backwards,” in Spiked, which
describes “the memes of feudal times” as “driven by illiteracy, bias, and a rejection of the West’s past”
(https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/12/15/the-new-dark-ages/).
5 Matthew Gabriele and David Perry, The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe
(New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2021).
6 Andrew Albin, Mary Erler, Thomas O’Donnell, Nicholas Paul, and Nina Rowe, eds. Whose
Middle Ages? Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past (New York: Fordham University Press,
2019).
7 Kathleen Bickford Berzock, Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and
Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).
8 Sara Lipton, Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins on Anti-Jewish Iconography (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2014).
 9 Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2018); Cord Whitaker, Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from
Medieval Race-Thinking (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
 Bibliography

Primary Sources
Primary Sources in English Translation
Angela of Foligno. Angela of Foligno: Complete Works, trans. Paul Lachance. Mahwah: Paulist
Press, 1993.
Anon. The Cloud of Unknowing: with the Book of Privy Counselling, trans. Carmen Acevedo
Butcher. Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 2009.
Aquinas, Thomas. Thomas Aquinas, The Treatise on Happiness: Summa theologiae IaIIae 1–21,
trans. Thomas Williams, commentary by Christina Van Dyke and Thomas Williams. Hackett Aquinas
Series. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 2016.
Bonaventure. Bonaventure: The Soul’s Journey into God; The Tree of Life; the Life of St. Francis,
trans. Ewert Cousins. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1978.
Bonaventure. The Works of Bonaventure, Vol. 1: The Journey of the Mind to God, The Triple Way
or Love Enkindled, The Tree of Life, The Mystical Vine, On the Perfection of Life, Addressed to
Sisters, trans. J. de Vinck. Mansfield Centre: Martino Publishing, 2016.
Catherine of Siena. Catherine of Siena: The Dialogue, trans. Suzanne Noffke. Mahwah: Paulist
Press, 1980.
Chrétien de Troyes. The Complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes, trans. David Staines.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Clare of Assisi. Francis and Clare: The Complete Works, trans. Armstrong, Regis J., and Brady,
Ignatius C. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1986.
de Lorris, Guillaume, and Jean de Meun. The Romance of the Rose, trans. Charles Dahlberg.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.
de Pizan, Christine. The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Richards. New York: Persea Books,
1982, rev. 1998.
de Pizan, Christine. A Medieval Woman’s Mirror of Honor, trans. Charity Cannon Willard. New York:
Persea Books, 1989.
Ebner, Margaret. Margaret Ebner: Major Works, trans. and ed. Leonard Hindsley. Mahwah: Paulist
Press, 1993.
Eckhart, Meister. Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense,
ed. and trans. Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1981.
Eckhart, Meister. Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, ed. B McGinn, trans. McGinn, F. Tobin,
and E. Borgstadt. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1986.
Eckhart, Meister. The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, trans. Maurice O’C. Walshe.
New York: Crossroads Publishing Co., 2010.
Francis of Assisi. Francis and Clare: The Complete Works, trans. Armstrong, Regis J., and Brady,
Ignatius C. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1986.
Gertrude of Helfta. Gertrude of Helfta: The Herald of Divine Love, trans. and ed. Margaret
Winkworth. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1993.
Guigo II. The Ladder of Monks and Twelve Meditations, trans. Edmund Colledge, OSA, and James
Walsh, SJ. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1978.
Hadewijch. Hadewijch: The Complete Works. ed. and trans. Mother Columba Hart, OSB. Mahwah:
Paulist Press, 1980.
Hilton, Walter. The Scale (or Ladder) of Perfection, ed. Serenus Cressy. Monee, IL: Scotts Valley
California, 2010.
Hrotsvit of Gandersheim. Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: A Florilegium of Her Works, trans. with an
introduction, essay, and notes by Katharina Wilson. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998.
Julian of Norwich. Julian of Norwich: Showings, trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh. Mahwah:
Paulist Press, 1978.
Julian of Norwich. The Showings of Julian of Norwich: A New Translation, trans. Mirabai Starr.
Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Co., 2013.
Kempis, Thomas à. The Imitation of Christ, trans. William C. Creasy. Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria
Press, 2017.
Locke, John. Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1975.
Marguerite d’Oingt. The Writings of Margaret of Oingt, Medieval Prioress and Mystic (d. 1310),
trans. with an introduction, essay, and notes by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski. Cambridge: D. S.
Brewer, 1990.
Mechthild of Hackeborn. Mechthild of Hackeborn: The Book of Special Grace, trans. Barbara
Newman. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2017.
Mechthild of Magdeburg. Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans.
Frank Tobin. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1998.
Meditations on the Life of Christ, trans. F. X. Taney, Anne Miller, and C. Mary Stallings-Taney.
Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 2000.
Meditations on the Life of Christ: The Short Italian Text, trans. Sarah McNamer. Notre Dame, IN:
Notre Dame University Press, 2018.
Porete, Marguerite. Marguerite Porete. The Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. E. L. Babinsky. Mahwah:
Paulist Press, 1993.
Pseudo-Dionisius. Pseudo-Dionisius: the Complete Works, trans. Colm Luiheid. Mahwah: Paulist
Press, 1987.
Richard of St. Victor. Richard of St. Victor: The Twelve Patriarchs, The Mystical Ark, Book Three
of the Trinity, trans. Grover Zinn. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1979.
Richard of St. Victor and Anon. The Pursuit of Wisdom and Other Works by the Author of the
Cloud of Unknowing, ed. and trans. James Walsh. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1988.
Rolle, Richard. The Fire of Love, trans. Clifton Wolters. New York: Penguin Classics, 1972.
Rolle, Richard. Richard Rolle: The English Writings, ed. and trans. Rosamund Allen. Mahwah: Paulist
Press, 1988.
Ruusbroec, Jan. John Ruusbroec: The Spiritual Espousals and Other Works, ed. and trans. John A.
Wiseman. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1985.
 Primary Sources in the Original Language
Angela of Foligno. Angela da Foligno, Memoriale. Edizione crita a cura di Enrico Menestò.
Spoleto: Fondazione Centro Italiano di Studi sull’alto Medioevo, 2013.
Anon. The Book of Privy Counselling. MS: British Library Harley 674 (H), fols. 92r–110v.
Anon. The Cloud of Unknowing. MS: British Library Harley 674 (H), fols. 17v–31v.
Bernhard of Clairvaux. Sermones in Cantica Canticorum, in Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Vol. 183,
ed. J.-P. Minge. Turnhout: Brepols, 1969.
Catherine of Siena. Caterina da Siena. Libro della divina dottrina volgarmente detto Dialogo della
divina Provvidenza. http://www.bibliotecaitaliana.it/testo/si074, 2018.
Eckhart, Meister. Die deutschen und lateinischen Werke. Herausgegeben im Auftrage der
Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft. Stuttgart and Berlin: W. Kohlhammer, 1936–.
Grosseteste, Robert. Commentarius in Posteriorum Analyticorum Libros, ed. P. Rossi, Florence: Leo
S. Olschki, 1981.
Hadewijch. Hadewijch: Brieven. 2 vols, ed. Jozef Van Mierlo. Louvain: Vlaamsch Boekenhalle, 1924–
5.
Hadewijch. Hadewijch: Visioenen. 2 vols, ed. Jozef Van Mierlo. Louvain: Vlaamsch Boekenhalle,
1924–5.
Hilton, Walter. The Scale of Perfection. MS: Cambridge University Library, MS Add. 6686.
Julian of Norwich. The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A
Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2006.
Margaret Ebner. Margaretha Ebner und Heinrich von Nördlingen. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der
deutschen Mystik, by Philipp Strauch. Freiburg i. B. and Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1882.
Marguerite d’Oingt. Les Oeuvres de Marguerite d’Oingt, ed. and trans. Duraffour, A., Gardette, P.,
and Durdilly, P. Publications de l’Institut de Linguistique Romane de Lyon, 21. Paris: Belles Lettres,
1965.
Meditationes Vitae Christi, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis (CCCM 153), ed.
Mary Stallings-Taney. Turnhout: Brepols, 1997.
Porete, Marguerite. Le Mirouer des simple âmes, ed. Romana Guarnieri. Turnhout: Brepols, 1986.
Richard de St. Victor. De Trinitate: texte critique avec introduction, notes et tables, ed. Jean
Ribaillier. Paris: J. Vrin, 1958.
Ruusbroec, Jan. Werken, ed. Ruusbroecgenootschap. 4 vols. Mechelen: Het Kompas, 1932–4; 2nd rev.
ed., Tielt: Uitgeverij Lannoo, 1944–8.
Tauler, John. Die Predigten Taulers, ed. Ferdinand Vetter (Berlin: Wiedmann, 1910; photomechanical
repr., 1968).
von Bingen, Hildegard. Analecta Sanctae Hildegardis, ed. J. B. Pitra. Monte Cassino, 1882.
von Bingen, Hildegard. Epistolarium, ed. Lieven Van Acker. CCCM 91–91a. Turnhout, 1991, 1993.
von Bingen, Hildegard. Liber divinorum operum, ed. Albert Derolez and Peter Dronke. CCCM 92.
Turnhout: Brepols, 1996.
Windeatt, Barry, ed. English Mystics of the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994.
 Secondary Sources
Adamson, Peter. Medieval Philosophy: A History of Philosophy without Any Gaps, Vol. 4. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2019.
Albin, Andrew, Mary Erler, Thomas O’Donnell, Nicholas Paul, and Nina Rowe, eds. Whose Middle
Ages? Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019.
Allen, Prudence. The Concept of Woman. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1997,
2006.
Alston, William. Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1991.
Andersen, Elizabeth, Henrike Lähnemann, and Anne Simon, eds. A Companion to Mysticism and
Devotion in Northern Germany in the Late Middle Ages. Leiden: Brill, 2014.
Badea, Gabriela. Allegories of Selfhood in Medieval Devotional Literature. Doctoral Thesis,
Columbia University, 2018.
Bagger, M. Religious Experience, Justification, and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999.
Beal, Jane. “The Unicorn as a Symbol for Christ in the Middle Ages,” in Illuminating Jesus in the
Middle Ages, ed. J. Beal. Leiden: Brill, 2019, 154–88.
Beckwith, Sarah. Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Medieval Writings. London:
Routledge, 1993.
Bell, Rudolph. Holy Anorexia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Berges, Sandrine. “Teaching Christine de Pizan in Turkey,” Gender and Education 25/5 (2013), 595–
605.
Berzock, Kathleen Bickford. Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange
across Medieval Saharan Africa. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.
Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate, and Timea Szell, eds. Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1991.
Blumenthal, David. “On the Intellect and the Rational Soul,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 15
(1977), 207–11.
Borland, Jennifer. “Unruly Reading: the Consuming Role of Touch in the Experience of a Medieval
MS,” in Scraped, Stroked, and Bound: Materially Engaged Readings of Medieval Manuscripts,
ed. Jonathan Wilcox. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013, 97–114.
Bornstein, Daniel. “Women and Religion in Late Medieval Italy: History and Historiography,” in Women
and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. D. Bornstein and R. Rusconi, trans. Margery
Schneider. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, 1–27.
Bos, E. P. Medieval Supposition Theory Revisited. Leiden: Brill Publishing, 2013.
Boulter, Stephen. Why Medieval Philosophy Matters. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
Brower, Jeff. Aquinas’s Ontology of the Material World: Change, Hylomorphism, and Material
Objects. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Browne, Borden Parker. Personalism. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1908.
Buber, Martin. Ich and Du (I and Thou), trans. Ronald Gregor Smith. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1987,
2nd ed.
Burns, J. H., ed. The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c.350–c.1450. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Bynum, Caroline Walker. Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to
Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Bynum, Caroline Walker. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body
in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone Books, 1991.
Bynum, Caroline Walker. The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336, New
York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
Bynum, Caroline Walker. Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern
Germany and Beyond. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
Caciola, Nancy. Discerning Spirits, Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2003.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: Pantheon Books, 1949.
Celano, Anthony. Aristotle’s Ethics and Medieval Philosophy: Moral Goodness and Practical
Wisdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Cornet, Ineke. The Arnhem Mystical Sermons: Preaching Liturgical Mysticism in the Context of
Catholic Reform, Leiden: Brill, 2019.
Cory, Therese Scarpelli. Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2014.
Crosby, John. “The Incommunicability of Human Persons,” The Thomist 57/3 (1993) 403–42.
Cusato, Michael. “Poverty”, The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, eds. R. Pasnau and C.
Van Dyke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 577–92.
Dales, Richard. “The De-Animation of the Heavens in the Middle Ages”, Journal of the History of
Ideas 41/4 (1980), 531–50.
Dales, Richard. The Problem of the Rational Soul in the Thirteenth Century, Leiden: Brill, 1995.
Daly, Mary. The Church and the Second Sex, Boston: Beacon Press, 1985.
Davis, Emmalon. “Typecasts, Tokens, and Spokespersons: A Case for Credibility Excess as Testimonial
Injustice”, Hypatia 31/3 (2016), 485–501.
de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex, trans. by H.M. Parshley. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
de Certeau, Michel. La Fable mystique: XVI–XVII siècle. Paris: Gallimard, 1982.
de Certeau, Michel. Heterologies. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986.
Denise, Sister Mary. “The Orchard of Syon: An Introduction,” Traditio 14 (1958), 269–93.
de Rijk, Lambertus Marie. Logica Modernorum—A Contribution to the History of Early Terminist
Logic, componsed of On the Twelfth Century Theory of Fallacy (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1962) and
the two-part The Origin and Early Development of the Theory of Supposition (Assen: Van
Gorcum, 1967).
de Töth, Pietro Tommaso. Storia di S. Chiara da Montefalco secondo un antico documento
dell’anno 1308. Siena: tip. pont. S. Bernardino, 1908.
DeYoung, Rebecca Konyndyk, Coleen McCluskey, and Christina Van Dyke. Aquinas’s Ethics:
Metaphysical Foundations, Moral Theory, and Theological Context. Notre Dame, IN: University
of Notre Dame Press, 2009.
Ebbersmeyer, Sabrina, and Gianni Paganini, eds. Women, Philosophy, and Science: Italy and Early
Modern Europe. (Women in the History of Philosophy and Sciences, Vol. 4.) Cham: Springer Nature
Switzerland AG, 2020.
Fanous, Samuel, and Vincent Gillespie, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English
Mysticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Fibla, Sergi Sancho. “Colors and Books in Marguerite d’Oingt’s Speculum. Images for Meditation and
Vision,” Commitments to Medieval Mysticism within Contemporary Contexts, Bibliotheca
Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium. Leuven: Peeters, 2017, 255–71.
Flora, Holly. The Devout Belief of the Imagination. The Paris Meditationes Vitae Christi and
Female Franciscan Spirituality in Trecento Italy. Disciplina Monastica, Vol. 6, Turnhout: Brepols,
2009.
Franke, W. On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature,
and the Arts, Vol. 1: Classic Formulations. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2007.
Frelick, Nancy, ed. “Introduction,” in The Mirror in Medieval and Early Modern Culture: Specular
Reflections. Turnhout: Brepols, 2016.
Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007.
Frugoni, Chiara. “Female Mystics, Visions, and Iconography,” in Women and Religion on Medieval
and Renaissance Italy, ed. D. Bornstein and R. Rusconi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996, 130–64.
Furlong, Monica. Visions & Longings, Medieval Women Mystics, Boston: Shambhala Publications,
2013.
Gabriele, Matthew, and David Perry. The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe. New
York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2021.
Gavrilyuk, Paul, and S. Coakley, eds. The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Gellman, Jerome. Mystical Experience of God, a Philosophical Inquiry. London: Ashgate
Publishers, 2001.
Gellman, Jerome. “Mysticism,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. N. Zalta,
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mysticism/. First pub. 2004; substantial rev. 2018.
Gilbert, Bennett. “Early Carthusian Script and Silence.” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 49/3 (Fall, 2014),
367–97.
Gilson, Étienne. “Le personnalisme chrétien,” in L’esprit de la philosophie médiévale. Librairie
philosophique. Paris: J. Vrin, 1932, 195–215.
Glanz, Elaine. “Richard Rolle’s Imagery in Meditations on the Passion B: A Reflection of Richard of St.
Victor’s Benjamin Minor,” Mystics Quarterly 22/2 (1996) 58–68.
Green, Karen. “Virtue Ethics and the Origins of Feminism: The Case of Christine de Pizan,” in Feminist
History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought, ed. E.
O’Neill and M. Lascano. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2019, 261–79.
Greene, Logan Dale. The Discourse of Hysteria: The Topoi of Humility, Physicality, and Authority
in Women’s Rhetoric. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2009.
Grundmann, Herbert. “Die Frauen und die Literatur im Mittelalter: Ein Beitrag zur Frage nach der
Entstehung des Schrifttums in der Volkssprache,” Archiv fur Kulturgeschichte 26 (1936), 129–61.
Grundmann, Herbert. Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter: Untersuchungen über die
geschichtlichen Zusammenhänge zwischen der Ketzerei, den Bettelorden und der religiösen
Frauenbewegung im 12. und 13 Jahrhundert (1935), trans. and repub. as Religious Movements
in the Middle Ages: The Historical Links between Heresy, the Mendicant Orders, and the
Women’s Religious Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Century, with the Historical
Foundations of German Mysticism. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995.
Harris, Nigel. The Thirteenth-Century Animal Turn: Medieval and Twenty-First-Century
Perspectives. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
Harvey, Susan Ashbrook. Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Heng, Geraldine. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2018.
Hindsley, Leonard. The Mystics of Engelthal: Writings from a Medieval Monastery. New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1998.
Hollywood, Amy. The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite of Porete, and
Meister Eckhart. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995.
Hollywood, Amy. Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Hollywood, Amy, and P. Dailey, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Hughes, Aaron. The Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004.
Hughes-Edwards, Mari. Reading Medieval Anchoritism: Ideology and Spiritual Practice. Cardiff:
University of Wales Press, 2012.
Hyman, Arthur, James Walsh, and Thomas Williams, eds. Philosophy in the Middles Ages: The
Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Traditions, 3rd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 2010.
Idel, Moshe, and Bernard McGinn, eds. Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: An
Ecumenical Dialogue. New York: Continuum, 1999.
Jaeger, C. Stephen. The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly
Ideals 939–1210. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.
James, William. Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Gifford Lectures held
at Harvard, 1902.
Jantzen, Grace. Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995.
Johnson, Timothy. “Visual Imagery and Contemplation in Clare of Assisi’s ‘Letters to Agnes of
Prague’,” Mystics Quarterly 19/4 (1993), 161–72.
Jung, Jacqueline. Eloquent Bodies: Movement, Expression, and the Human Figure in Gothic
Sculpture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020.
Karnes, Michelle. Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2011.
Katz, Steven, ed. Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Kaufman, Amy, and Paul Sturtevant. The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the
Medieval Past. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020.
Kent, Bonnie. Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century.
Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995.
Kieckhefer, Richard. “Mysticism and Social Consciousness in the Fourteenth Century,” Revue de
l’Universite d’Ottawa 48 (1978), 179–86.
Kieckhefer, Richard. “Holiness and the Culture of Devotion: Remarks on Some Late Medieval Male
Saints,” in Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. R. Blumenfeld-Kosinski and T. Szell.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991, 288–305.
Kim, Hannah. “Metaphors in Neo-Confucian Korean Philosophy,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 2022, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaac/kpac030.
King, Peter. “Marguerite Porete and Godfrey of Fontaines: Detachable Will, Discardable Virtue,
Transformative Love,” in Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy Vol. 6. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2018, 168–188.
Knowles, David. The Religious Orders in England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948–9.
Knudson, Albert Cornelius. The Philosophy of Personalism. New York: Abingdon Press, 1927.
Kobusch, Theo. Die Entdeckung der Person: Metaphysik der Freiheit und modernes
Menschenbild. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997.
Kristeller, Paul Oskar. “The Dignity of Man,” in Renaissance Concepts of Man and Other Essays.
New York: Harper & Row, 1972, 1–21.
Lackey, Jennifer. “False Confessions and Testimonial Injustice,” The Journal of Criminal Law and
Criminology 110/1 (2020) 43–68.
Largier, Nicholas. “Inner Senses – Outer Senses: The Practice of Emotions in Medieval Mysticism”, in
Emotions and Sensibilities in the Middle Ages, ed. C. Jaeger and I. Kasten. Berlin and New York:
de Gruyter, 2003, 3–15.
Lerius, Julia. “Hildegard von Bingen on Autonomy” in Women Philosophers on Autonomy: Historical
and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. S. Berges and A. Sinai. New York: Routledge, 2018, 9–23.
Lerner, Robert. The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1972.
Lewis, Gertrud Jaron. By Women, for Women, about Women: the Sister-Books of Fourteenth-
Century Germany. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1996.
Lima, Manual. The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge. New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 2014.
Lipton, Sara. Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins on Anti-Jewish Iconography. New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2014.
Lochrie, Karma. Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1991.
LoLordo, Antonia, ed. Persons: a History. Oxford Philosophical Concepts Series. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2019.
MacDonald, Scott. ‘Theory of Knowledge’, in The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, ed. N.
Kretzmann and E. Stump. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
McDonnell, Ernest. The Beguines and Berghards in Medieval Culture: with Special Emphasis on
the Belgian Scene. New York: Octagon Books, 1969.
McGinn, Bernard. “Ascension and Introversion in the Itinerarium mentis in Deum,” in San
Bonaventura 1274–1974 Vol. 3. Grottaferrata/Rome: Collegio S. Bonaventura, 1974.
McGinn, Bernard. “Introduction,” in Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries,
Treatises, and Defense, ed. Edmund Colledge, OSA, and Bernard McGinn. Mahwah: Paulist Press,
1981, 1–61.
McGinn, Bernard, ed. Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics: Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechthild
of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete. New York: Continuum, 1994.
McGinn, Bernard. 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. New York:
Crossroad Publishing Co., 1998.
McGinn, Bernard. The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany 1300–1500. Vol. 4 of The
Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism. New York: Crossroad Publishing
Co., 2005.
McGinn, Bernard. Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism: 1350–1550. Vol. 5 of The Presence of God:
A History of Western Christian Mysticism. New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 2016.
McNamer, Sarah. “The Origins of the Meditationes Vitae Christi,” Speculum 84 (2009), 905–55.
Mancia, Lauren. Emotional Monasticism: Affective Piety in the Eleventh-century Monastery of
John of Fécamp. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019.
Marenbon, John. Medieval Philosophy: an Historical and Philosophical Introduction. London:
Routledge, 2007.
Marin, Juan. “Annihilation and Deification in Beguine Theology and Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of
Simple Souls,” Harvard Theological Review 103/1 (2010), 89–102.
Marrone, Steven. The Light of Thy Countenance: Science and Knowledge of God in the Thirteenth
Century. 2 Vols. Leiden: Brill, 2001.
Marrone, Steven. “From Gundisalvus to Bonaventure: Intellect and intelligences in the late twelfth and
early thirteenth centuries,” in Intellect and imagination dans la philosophie médiévale, Vol. 2, ed.
M. C. Pacheco and J. F. Meirinhos. Brepols: Turnhout, 2006, 1071–81.
Matter, E. Ann, and John Coakley, eds. Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A
Religious and Artistic Renaissance. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.
Mazzoni, Christina. “Angela of Foligno,” in Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition c.1100–
c.1500, ed. A. Minnis and R. Voaden. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010, 581–600.
Mercer, Christia. “Descartes’ Debt to Teresa of Avila, or why we should work on women in the history
of philosophy,” Philosophical Studies 174/10 (2017), 2539–55.
Mews, Constant, and Anna Welch, eds. Poverty and Devotion in Mendicant Cultures 1200–1450.
London: Routledge, 2016.
Minnis, Alastair, and Rosalynn Voaden, eds. Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition
c.1100–c.1500. Brepols Collected Essays in European Culture 1. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010.
Mooney, Catherine. “The Authorial Role of Brother A in the Composition of Angela of Foligno’s
Revelations,” in Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic
Renaissance, ed. E. Ann Matter and John Coakley. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1994, 34–63.
Mooney, Catherine, ed. Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
Moore, R.I. The War on Heresy: Faith and Power in Medieval Europe. London: Profile Books,
2012.
Morgan, Ben. On Becoming God: Late Medieval Mysticism and the Modern Western Self. New
York: Fordham University Press, 2013.
Mueller, Joan. The Privilege of Poverty: Clare of Assisi, Agnes of Prague, and the Struggle for a
Franciscan Rule for Women. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2006.
Murk-Jansen, Saskia. “Hadewijch,” in Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition c.1100–
c.1500, ed. A. Minnis and R. Voaden. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010, 663–85.
Neel, Carol. “The Origins of the Beguines,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14/2,
Working Together in the Middle Ages: Perspectives on Women’s Communities, 1989, 321–41.
Newman, Barbara. “Hildegard of Bingen: Visions and Validation,” Church History 54 (1985), 163–75.
Newman, Barbara. From Virile Woman to Woman Christ: Studies in Medieval Religion and
Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.
Newman, Barbara. ed. Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998.
Newman, Barbara. God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
Newman, Barbara. “What Does It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’? The Clash between Theory and Practice in
Medieval Visionary Culture,” Speculum 80/1 (2005), 1–43.
O’Neill, Eileen, and Marcy Lascano, eds. Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and
Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2019.
Pasnau, Robert. “Medieval Social Epistemology: Scientia for Mere Mortals,” Episteme 7/1 (2010), 23–
41.
Pasnau, Robert. Metaphysical Themes 1274–1671. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Pasnau, Robert. After Certainty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Pasnau, Robert, and C. Van Dyke, eds. The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Paulsell, Stephanie. “Writing and Mystical Experience in Marguerite d’Oingt and Virginia Woolf,”
Comparative Literature 44/3 (1991), 249–67.
Pawl, Tim. In Defense of Conciliar Christology. Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2016.
Payer, Pierre. “Prudence and the Principles of Natural Law: A Medieval Development,” Speculum
54/1 (1979), 55–70.
Pegis, Anton. St. Thomas and the Problem of the Soul in the Thirteenth Century, Toronto: Pontifical
Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1943.
Perler, Dominik. “Self-Knowledge in Scholasticism,” in Self-Knowledge, ed. U. Renz. Oxford
Philosophical Concepts Series. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, 114–30.
Pickavé, Martin, and Lisa Shapiro, eds. Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern
Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Pike, Nelson. Mystic Union: An Essay in the Phenomenology of Mysticism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1992.
Poor, Sara. Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book: Gender and the Making of Textual
Authority. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
Ragusa, Isa. “L’autore della Meditationes vitae Christi sedondo il codice ms Ital. 115 della Biblioteque
Nationale di Parigi,” Arte medievale 11 (1997), 145–50.
Renz, Ursula, ed. Self-Knowledge. Oxford Philosophical Concepts Series. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2017.
Reuther, Rosemary Radford. Sexism and God-talk: Towards a Feminist Theology, Boston: Beacon
Press, 1995.
Ritchey, Sara. “Spiritual Arborescence: Trees in the Medieval Christian Imagination,” Spiritus: A
Journal of Christian Spirituality 8/1 (2008), 64–82.
Roberts, Michelle Voss. “Retrieving Humility: Rhetoric, Authority, and Divinization in Mechtild of
Magdeburg,” Feminist Theology 18/1 (2009), 50–73.
Robertson, Elizabeth. “Medieval Medical Views of Women and Female Spirituality in the Ancrene
Wisse and Julian of Norwich’s Showings,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval
Literature, ed. L. Lomperis and S. Stanbury. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.
Robinson, Joanne. Nobility and Annihilation in Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls. Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2001.
Rudan, Paola. “Riscrivere la storia, fare la storia. Sulla donna come soggetto in Christine de Pizan e
Margeret Cavendish,” Scienza e Politica. Per Una Storia Delle Dottrine 28/54 (2016).
Schwietering, Julius. “The Origins of the Medieval Humility Formula,” PMLA 69/5 (1954), 1279–91.
Scott, Karen. “ ‘This is why I have put you among your neighbors’: St. Bernard’s and St. Catherine’s
Understanding of the Love of God and Neighbor,” in Atti del Simposio Internazionale Cateriniano-
Bernardiniano, ed. D. Maffei and P. Nardi (Siena: Accademia Senese degli Intronati, 1982), 279–94.
Shaffern, Robert. Law and Justice from Antiquity to Enlightenment. Lanham, ML: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers, 2009.
Silvas, Anna. Jutta and Hildegard: The Biographical Sources. Turnhout: Brepols, 1998.
Spade, Paul, and Thomas Williams. “Medieval Philosophy,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/medieval-philosophy/.
Stace, Walter T. Mysticism and Philosophy. London: Macmillan & Co., 1960.
Steiner, Rudolf. Mystics after Modernism: discovering the seeds of a new science in the
Renaissance, trans. Karl E. Zimmer. Great Barrington, MA: Anthroposophic Press, 2000.
Stump, Eleonore. Aquinas, New York: Routledge, 2003.
Suydam, Mary. “The Politics of Authorship: Hadewijch of Antwerp and the Mengeldichten,” Mystics
Quarterly 22/1 (1996), 2–20.
Suydam, Mary. “The Touch of Satisfaction: Visions and Religious Experience According to Hadewijch
of Antwerp,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 12 (Fall, 1996), 5–27.
Tiereny, Brian. Medieval Poor Law: A Sketch of Canonical Theory and Its Application in
England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959.
Toner, Patrick. “St. Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Too Many Thinkers,” The Modern Schoolman
89 (2012), 209–22.
Tóth, Peter, and Dávid Falvay. “New Light on the Date and Authorship of the Meditationes vitae
Christi,” in Devotional Culture in Late Medieval England and Europe: Diverse Imaginations of
Christ’s Life, ed. Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry. Turnhout: Brepols, 2015, 17–104.
Trinkaus, Charles. “In Our Image and Likeness”: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist
Thought. 2 Vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.
Turner, Denys. The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995.
Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual
Consciousness. Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 1911.
Underhill, Evelyn. The Essentials of Mysticism and Other Essays. New York: Dutton, 1920.
Van Ackeren, Marcel, ed. Philosophy and the Historical Perspective. Proceedings of the British
Academy. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2018), 214.
Van Dyke, Christina. “Not Properly a Person: the Rational Soul and ‘Thomistic Substance Dualism,’ ”
Faith and Philosophy 26/2 (2009), 186–204.
Van Dyke, Christina. “Mysticism,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, ed. R. Pasnau
and C. Van Dyke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 720–34.
Van Dyke, Christina. “The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth: Robert Grosseteste on
Universals (and the Posterior Analytics),” Journal of the History of Philosophy 48/2 (2010), 153–
70.
Van Dyke, Christina. “I See Dead People: Disembodied Souls and Aquinas’s ‘Two-Person’ Problem,”
in Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy Vol. 2, ed. R. Pasnau. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2014, 25–45.
Van Dyke, Christina. “Aquinas’s Shiny Happy People: Perfect Happiness and the Limits of Human
Nature,” in Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Religion Vol. 6, ed. J. Kvanvig. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015, 269–91.
Van Dyke, Christina. “Self-Knowledge, Abnegation, and Fulfillment in Medieval Mysticism,” in Self-
Knowledge, ed. U. Renz. Oxford Philosophical Concepts Series Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2017, 131–45.
Van Dyke, Christina. “‘Many Know Much, but Do Not Know Themselves’: Self-Knowledge, Humility,
and Perfection in the Medieval Affective Contemplative Tradition,” in Consciousness and Self-
Knowledge in Medieval Philosophy: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and
Metaphysics Vol. 14, ed. G. Klima and A. Hall. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2018, 89–106.
Van Dyke, Christina. “What Has History to Do with Philosophy? Insights from the Medieval
Contemplative Tradition,” in Philosophy and the Historical Perspective, ed. M. Van Ackeren.
Proceedings of the British Academy. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2018), 155–70.
Van Dyke, Christina. “Medieval Mystics on Persons: What John Locke Didn’t Tell You,” in Persons: a
History, ed. A. LoLordo. Oxford Philosophical Concepts Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2019, 123–53.
Van Dyke, Christina. “The Phenomenology of Immortality (1200–1400),” in The History of the
Philosophy of Mind. Vol. 2: Philosophy of Mind in the Early and High Middle Ages, ed. M.
Cameron. London: Routledge, 2019, 219–39.
Van Dyke, Christina. “From Meditation to Contemplation: Broadening the Borders of Philosophy in the
13th–15th Centuries,” in Pluralizing Philosophy’s Past—New Reflections in the History of
Philosophy, ed. A. Griffioen and M. Backmann. London: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming.
Van Dyke, Christina. “Lewd, Feeble, and Frail: Humility Formulae, Medieval Women, and Authority,” in
Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy Vol. 10. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
Van Steenberghen, Fernand. Thomas Aquinas and Radical Aristotelianism, Washington, D.C.:
Catholic University Press, 1980.
Voaden, Rosalynn. God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of
Late-Medieval Women Visionaries. Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 1999.
Voaden, Rosalynn. “Mechthild of Hackeborn,” in Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition
c.1100–c.1500, ed. A. Minnis and R. Voaden. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010, 431–51.
Wada, Yoko, ed. A Companion to Ancrene Wisse. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003.
Wallace, David, ed. The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999.
Ward, Jennifer. Women in Medieval Europe 1200–1500, 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2016.
Watson, Nicholas. “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Mysticism, ed.
S. Fanous and V. Gillespie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 1–28.
Watt, Diane. Women, Writing, and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100. Studies in Early
Medieval History. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
Wei, Ian. Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary
Between Humans and Animals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Whitaker, Cord. Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
Williamson, Beth. The Madonna of Humility: Development, Dissemination, and Reception, c.1340–
1400. Bristol Studies in Medieval Cultures, Vol. 1. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer Press, 2009.
Winston-Allen, Anne. Convent Chronicles: Women Writing about Women and Reform in the Late
Middle Ages. University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
Wojtyla, Karol. “Thomistic Personalism,” in Person and Community: Selected Essays (Catholic
Thought from Lublin: Vol. 4), ed. Andrew Woznicki. New York: Peter Lang, 1993, 165–75.
Zheng, Robin. “What is My Role in Changing the System? A New Model of Responsibility for
Structural Injustice,” Ethical Theory & Moral Practice 21 (2018), 869–85.
 Index

Note: Figures are indicated by an italic “f ” following the page numbers.

For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion,
appear on only one of those pages.

affective experiences 2–3, 6–7, 9–11, 14–16, 18–20, 37–38, 114–115, 126–127, 156, 173, 192–193, 197–
199
affective mysticism 14–19, 58–59, 153–154, 193–194, 196
afterlife 23–24, 26–27, 47, 179–185, 187–191, 198–199, 201–205
angels 59, 69, 149, 160–161, 181–183, 190–191, 202–203
Angela of Foligno 9–10, 15, 27–28, 47, 87–88, 151–153, 155–156, 167–168, 185, 191–197
annihilation, of self 5, 7–9, 12–14, 57–59, 88–89, 154, 185–190, 197, 199
Anselm of Canterbury 175–176
apophaticism and apophatic mysticism 11–15, 19, 22, 30–31, 57–58, 70–72, 86–87, 124, 154, 184–186,
188–189, 193–198
Aristotle 74–75, 90–91, 134–135, 135f, 200
Augustine 25–26, 55–56, 69–70, 84–85, 90–91, 106, 142–143, 168–169, 177, 181–182

beguinage 62–66, 64f, 65f

beguine 15, 25–29, 62–66, 85–86, 100, 130–131, 151–153, 159, 170–171, 194
Bernard of Clairvaux 25–26, 52–54, 117, 119, 131, 153
Birgitta (Bridget) of Sweden 9–10, 29, 30f, 32, 93–95
Boethius 142–143
Consolation of Philosophy 32, 69–70, 79–80
Definition of person 147, 149–150
Bonaventure 26, 37–38, 75, 80–81, 106, 110–113, 123, 147–149, 175–176
Mind’s Journey into God 26, 37–38, 112–113
Mystical Vine 106
Tree of Life 26, 110–111
Book of Privy Counselling 30–31, 35, 58, 76, 123

Canterbury Cathedral 96–97

Carthusian Order 15, 28, 112–113, 116, 127–129, 156, 176–177
charity (caritas), see love
Catherine of Siena 15, 29–30, 31f, 32, 36–37, 40–41, 44, 47, 49, 51, 54–55, 80–81, 83–86, 106, 109–110,
122–123, 137–138, 138f, 151–153, 160–161, 164–165, 167–170, 191–195
Chartres Cathedral 96–97
Christ
as fully human and fully divine 15–18, 28, 58–61, 77, 85–86, 106, 140, 154–155, 159, 190–198
as Second Person of the Trinity 59, 86, 91–92, 119–120, 125, 140, 146, 153–155, 162–165, 176–177,
191–192, 195
imitation of 122–124, 163–164
life and Passion of 15–16, 32, 43–44, 52–54, 53f, 54f, 102, 114–119, 115f, 121, 128f
Christine de Pizan 32, 41–42, 79–80, 80f, 160–161
City of Ladies, see Christine de Pizan
Clare of Assisi 25, 43–46, 113–114, 122, 167, 174–176
Cloud of Unknowing 11–14, 22, 30–31, 58, 76, 91–92, 104, 108–109, 124, 188–189, 193–194
Consolation of Philosophy, see Boethius
contemplation (contemplatio) 23, 50, 54, 58, 76–79, 102–103, 107, 112–113, 116, 119–126, 129–130,
165–166, 173, 189, 202–204

Dante 26–27, 83–84

Dark Ages 206–207
De Imitatione Christi, see Thomas à Kempis
Decretum and Decretals (see also Gratian) 142–144
dialogue, as philosophical genre 27, 69–71, 73, 162, 164–165, 167–171, 173
Dialogue, see Catherine of Siena
dignity 23, 44–48, 61, 83–84, 124–125, 144–146, 150–151, 157–161, 172–173, 203–204
divine illumination 55–56, 78–79, 107–108, 177–178, 181–182, 199–200
Dominican Order 26–30, 65, 73, 75, 88–89, 93–95, 145–146, 150, 154–155, 187, 193, 198
Duns Scotus, see John Duns Scotus

faith 43, 67–68, 77–78, 84–85, 101

personification of 78, 101
feeling, see affective experience
Ficino, Marsilio 32, 105, 157–158, 160
fin’amour 71, 73, 81–82, 134, 136–137
Fire of Love, see Richard Rolle
Flowing Light of the Godhead, see Mechthild of Magdeburg
Franciscan Order 15, 25–29, 80–81, 114–115, 126–127, 145–146, 150–153, 175–176, 185, 191–192, 198
Francis of Assisi 25, 26f, 145–146, 153, 167, 175–176

Gertrude the Great, also Gertrude of Helfta 27, 47–48, 87, 131, 159–160
Guigio II 112–114, 116
Gratian 142–143

Hadewijch 15, 17–18, 25–26, 30, 35, 37–38, 46–48, 54–56, 80–83, 85–86, 125, 131, 136–137, 151–153,
156–157, 159, 161–162, 167–168, 170–171, 184, 193–194, 196–197, 199
heaven, see also afterlife 50, 60, 78, 85–86, 148–149, 160, 190–192, 198, 202–203
Henry Suso 29, 91–92
Herald of Divine Love, see Gertrude the Great
human beings
nature of 2–3, 14–18, 33, 45–48, 59, 68–69, 76–79, 81–86, 102–103, 106–108, 112–113, 130–131,
139, 142, 145–146, 148–149, 154–155, 157–164, 171–172, 181–184, 191–193, 202–203
restoration of through Christ 58–60, 159
ultimate or final end of 11–12, 14, 21–24, 56–61, 67, 70, 78, 125, 149–150, 170, 185, 189–190, 194–
199, 201–203
humility 25, 32, 38–39, 43–51, 57–58, 61, 101, 123–125, 153, 159–160, 163–164, 166–168, 174–176
humility topos, as literary genre 127–129, 174–176, 178

imagination
as faculty of the rational soul 15–16, 21–23, 51–56, 68–69, 107–108, 110–114, 121–124, 149–150,
161, 200–201
in relation to intellect and reason 16–17, 21–23, 54–55, 68–69, 110–111, 113–114, 117–120
use in meditation and spiritual exercises 16, 23, 51–56, 102, 110–114, 123–124, 159
image of God (imago dei) 22, 37–38, 44–46, 67, 71–72, 84–85, 103, 122, 125, 127–129, 160–161, 164
imitation of Christ (for Imitation of Christ, see Thomas à Kempis) 122–124, 163–164
individuality 13, 23–24, 56–57, 73–76, 139–142, 147, 156–157, 162–163, 165, 172–173, 185–187, 201
intellect
as capacity of the rational soul 8–9, 14–16, 22–23, 52–54, 57, 67–69, 73, 78–79, 101, 103–104, 110–
111, 113–114, 119–120, 130–131, 149–150, 154–155, 158, 164–165, 181–184, 198–204
relation to imagination, see ‘imagination’
role in union with God 54, 70, 78–79, 149–150, 198–199, 202–204

James, Henry 2–3, 5–7, 10–11

Jan van Ruusbroec 25–26, 30, 44–45, 153, 156–157, 184
Johannes Tauler 28–29, 49, 57–58, 62–63, 65, 80–81, 105, 154–155, 163–164, 184, 187
John Duns Scotus 80–81, 150
John of the Cross 11–12
Julian of Norwich 32, 34–35, 44, 49–50, 59–60, 80–81, 84–89, 106, 120–122, 125, 153, 164, 167–168,
170, 174–175, 177–178, 184, 197

knowledge, see also self-knowledge 22–23, 33–34, 39, 41–42, 51–52, 54–55, 57, 59–60, 67, 69–73, 75–
77, 80–81, 83–84, 86–88, 90–92, 104–105, 107–108, 110–111, 135–136, 149–150, 162–165, 187–
188, 199–201
of God 44–45, 47, 49–50, 55–56, 59–60, 120–123, 126, 149–150, 170, 186–188, 194–195, 200–201
personified 45–46, 71–72, 101
scientia 22–23, 67–68, 74–75, 90–92, 135–136, 163–164
role in union with God, see ‘intellect, role in union with God’

Ladder of Monks (see also Guigio II) 112–114, 116

lectio divina 112–114, 117–119, 121–122
Locke, John 23, 139–140, 171–172
love, see also will
annihilation in 33–34, 73–75, 154–156, 162–163, 168–169, 186–188, 197
as primary component of mystical union with God 25–26, 58, 61, 70–71, 73–77, 80–84, 105, 123, 126,
150, 161–162, 164–165, 198–199
charity (caritas) 40, 43–45, 54, 61, 83–84, 164–165, 177, 194–195
fin’amor or courtly love 44, 81–83, 131, 133–137, 135f, 136f, 153
for and of God 18, 25, 46–48, 50, 73–75, 77, 80–84, 102, 104–107, 112–115, 117–122, 125–130, 136–
138, 149–150, 159–160, 164–165, 176–177, 192–193, 197, 199, 201–203
for neighbors 25, 36–37, 40, 50, 117–119
for self 37–40, 55–56, 61, 201
importance in meditation and contemplation 23, 54, 102–103, 112–115, 117–120, 122–124, 126–127,
192–193
personified 73–75, 81–83, 101, 134–135, 162, 166, 168–169, 186–187

Margaret Ebner 28–29, 88–90, 129–130, 151–153, 167, 193

Margery Kempe 88–89
Marguerite d’Oingt 15, 18–19, 28, 47–48, 60–61, 98–100, 115–117, 127–130, 156, 167–168, 174–177
Marguerite Porete 11–12, 28, 43, 57, 61, 73–76, 91–92, 101–102, 123–124, 131, 136–137, 151–154, 162,
166, 168–169, 184–187, 199
Mechthild of Hackeborn 27, 47–48, 131, 136–137, 167–168
Mechthild of Magdeburg 27, 38–39, 41–46, 71–73, 92, 131, 133–134, 136–137, 151–153, 156, 159–160,
168–170, 190–191, 193, 199
meditation (meditatio) 15–16, 23, 52–54, 102–103, 112–129, 173, 191–193
Meditations on the Life of Christ 52–54, 114–115, 117–121, 123–124, 126–127, 155–156
Meister Eckhart 2, 7–8, 11–14, 22, 25–26, 28–30, 35, 38, 49, 57–58, 62–63, 65, 75–76, 80–81, 88, 139–
140, 154–155, 162–163, 170, 184, 186–189, 192–194
memory as faculty of the rational soul 37–38, 68–69, 84–85, 125, 149–150, 161
Mind’s Journey into God, see Bonaventure
Mirror of Marguerite d’Oingt (see also Marguerite d’Oingt) 28, 98–100
mirror, as literary genre 43–44, 47–48, 70
mirror, as metaphor for self-knowledge 37–48, 45f, 52–54, 58–59, 79–80, 122, 160–161
Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (see also Nicholas Love) 117
Mirror of Simple Souls (see also Marguerite Porete) 12, 22, 28, 57, 73–76, 91–92, 101–102, 123–124,
136–137, 151–154, 162, 166, 168–169, 185–186
miserabiles personae as legal category 144–146, 145f
mystical experience 2–11, 13–17, 19–21, 28, 31, 58–60, 86–87, 129–130, 165–168, 185, 188–189, 191–
196
mystical union (see also intellect, love, and will) 7, 14–15, 18–19, 67–68, 86–89, 129–130, 147, 154–
157, 170, 179–180, 191–192, 194–197, 204

Nicholas Love 117

oratio, see prayer

Oxford University 67–68, 70–71, 90–91, 147, 171, 200–201
person 23, 103, 139–143, 146–150, 154, 157–161, 171–173, 182–184, 195
personalism, as philosophical theory 172–173
personification, as philosophical tool 23, 69–70, 77–80, 152f, 162, 165, 168–171, 169f, 174–175, 175f
Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 32, 157–158, 160
Piers Plowman 110–111, 165–166
pilgrims and pilgrimages 96–97, 144, 145f
Plato and Platonism 9, 11–12, 16, 32, 34–35, 55–56, 157–158, 168–169, 182–185, 188–189, 199–202,
204
practical wisdom 41–42, 42f, 78–79, 107, 161–162
prayer (oratio) 27, 62, 76, 112–113, 121–123, 125
prudence, see practical wisdom
Pursuit of Wisdom 30–31, 34–35, 44, 50

rational capacities (see also imagination, intellect, memory, sensation, and will) 23, 67–69, 76–81, 83–
90, 103, 107–110, 149–150, 161–165, 202–203
rational soul 142, 148–150, 179–184, 203–205
rationality 23, 67, 130–131, 139–140, 147, 149–151, 161–165, 171–173
reason, see also ‘imagination, relation to intellect and reason’, ‘intellect’, ‘rational capacities’, and
‘rationality’
nature of 68–70, 203
personified 41–42, 69–70, 73–83, 80f, 101, 107, 160–162, 166, 168–169
Reims Cathedral 97
Revelation of Love, see Julian of Norwich
Richard of St. Victor 13–14, 25–26, 30–31, 55–56, 77–79, 107–108, 110, 124–125, 159, 165–166
Richard Rolle 13–15, 28, 31, 153, 156
Robert Grosseteste 200–202, 204

sapientia, see also wisdom 90–92

Scale of Perfection, see Walter Hilton
scholasticism 1–2, 22–24, 26, 28, 33–34, 67–68, 70, 74–75, 77–79, 105, 140, 143–144, 147, 151, 161,
163–166, 171, 179–181, 184, 198–199, 204–205, 208
Showings of Divine Love, see Julian of Norwich
scientia, see ‘knowledge, scientia’
self
annihilation of 5–9, 11–14, 18, 21–24, 56–59, 61, 70–71, 73–76, 88, 90, 124, 154–156, 162–164, 184–
190, 193–195, 197, 199, 204
fulfillment or actualization of 10, 18–19, 21–24, 56, 58–61, 88–90, 156–157, 184, 189–190, 192–195,
197, 204
knowledge of 21–22, 33–51, 54–59, 61, 79–82, 89, 122–124, 149, 153–154, 160–161, 165–166, 170,
175–176, 197
selfishness 37, 40, 51, 54–56, 61
sense of 165–178, 187–189, 192–195
sensation and sense appetite 4–6, 8–9, 13–16, 18–19, 23, 31, 51–52, 54–55, 59–60, 68–69, 75, 78, 86,
89, 102–103, 105–112, 114–115, 119, 121–124, 126–127, 130–131, 139, 162–163, 170, 188–189,
193, 198–204
Showings, see Julian of Norwich
Sister Catherine treatise 187
spiritual disciplines/exercises (see also lectio divina, meditation, prayer, and contemplation) 15–16, 23,
27, 45–47, 49–50, 102–103, 112–114, 117–122, 124–129, 161–162
spiritual vision 3–5, 8–9, 16–19, 25–27, 32, 47–48, 60–61, 70, 73–74, 78, 81–83, 85–86, 98–100, 121–
122, 164–165, 167–168, 173, 193–197, 201–204
spirituality and spiritual life 9–10, 12–14, 21–22, 30–32, 34–35, 37, 40–41, 43–45, 47–48, 52–56, 85–86,
105–112, 123–125, 135–136, 142, 154, 164–166, 170, 175–176
St. Denis cathedral 96–97

Teresa of Avila 11–12

Thomas à Kempis 32, 91–92, 105, 153, 163–164
Thomas Aquinas 26–27, 77–79, 83–85, 103, 109, 147–149, 183–184, 202–204
tree, as metaphor for self 18–19, 47–50, 60, 83–86, 160
Tree of Life (see Bonaventure)
Tree of Life of the Crucified Jesus (see Ubertino Casale)
Trinity and Trinitarian theology 30, 32, 59, 66, 84–86, 88, 91–92, 119–121, 125, 139–140, 142, 147, 153,
162–165, 176–177, 191–192, 195
The Twelve Patriarchs (Benjamin Minor), see Richard of St. Victor

Ubertino da Casale 146

Underhill, Evelyn 2–3, 5–7, 9–10
University of Bologna 142–143
University of Paris 26–27, 67–68, 70–71, 90–91, 163–164

vernaculars, development and use of 70, 117, 136–137, 151–153

visions and visionary literature, see spiritual vision
Vision Showed to a Devout Woman (see also Julian of Norwich) 167–168
virtue 21–23, 40–47, 54–56, 77–79, 91–92, 101, 107, 109–110, 112, 117–119, 123–124, 133, 161–166,
174–175

Walter Hilton 13–14, 31, 188–189, 193–194

will (see also love)
as faculty of the rational soul 12, 23, 37–38, 51–55, 57, 68–70, 77–85, 102–111, 113–114, 117–120,
123–125, 129–130, 149–150, 154–155, 158, 162, 164–165, 177, 187, 198–199, 201
relation to sensation/sense appetite 107–110, 119, 126–127
role in union with God 73–75, 102–103, 105, 113–114, 121–124, 129–130, 150, 162, 187, 198–199, 201
wisdom 18, 54–55, 73, 76, 78, 81–84, 86, 88–95, 97, 101, 104, 125–126, 128f, 161–162, 164–165, 194
women
as authors 1–2, 65, 93–95, 93f, 94f, 100, 102–103, 126–127, 131–132, 151–153, 174–178
as better at loving than men 23, 102–103, 126–127, 130–131
as contemplatives and philosophers 1–2, 7–11, 23, 65–66, 97–100, 102–103, 126–127, 130–132, 153,
174–178, 207–208
as readers 65, 93–100, 95f, 96f, 98f, 99f, 114f, 115f, 131, 132f, 153
bodies and emotions as impeding intellection 3–4, 8–10, 126–127, 130–131
self-denigrating rhetoric and internalized misogyny 174–178