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MARY'S DOWRY

ENCLOSED CONTEMPLATION


artin Buber (1878-1965), as a young man, assembled contemplative writings into a most beautiful anthology he published in 1909 that he called Ekstatische Konfessionem, Ecstatic Conversations. Into it he poured the spirituality of Hassidic Jews, of Sufi, of the Friends of God, of Julian of Norwich. For in contemplation all religions become one, or, as Julian says in her Middle English 'oned', rather than 'noughting', cancelling each other out. Yet, as we study these contemplatives (not choosing the word 'mystic', too aloof from us), we shall find there is a division. The Torah and the Gospel are rooted and grounded in flesh and blood reality, in the beginning the Word creating all, then becoming flesh and blood, dwelling in our midst, the Incarnation, theology being the love of God and equally of our neighbour. Pseudo-Dionysius (Thomas Aquinas cited him over a thousand times believing he was the Dionysius the Areopagite of Acts), instead, was a Neoplatonist Syrian, who spoke of the 'dark cloud of unknowing' in which God is to be found, as if attaining the Buddhist Nirvana, Pseudo-Dionysius even inventing the word 'hierarchy'. We shall find the Cloud Author, who translated and put Pseudo-Dionysius' negative theology into practice in his contemplative treatises, to be resisted by the likes of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. The struggle is between elitist Plato and democratic Christ; between philosophy and its gender apartheid on the one hand, the Gospel and its inclusion of women on the other. That paradoxical dialectic caused a springtime in the Christian theology of prayer, a rich flowering and harvesting, down the centuries.

The ecstatic conversation amongst these contemplatives transcends space and time and gender and order, in dialogue between Augustinians, Benedictines, Brigittines, Carmelites, Carthusians, Cistercians, Dominicans, Franciscans, Hieronymites and lay people.The contemplative theology they conveyed was not the trauma of 'shock and awe', the sterile and paralysing apartheid of power, but instead the serotonin-enhancing awareness of the humility of the creature in the presence of the greatness, mercy and love, the might, wisdom and love, of the Creator. Amongst them illiterate women such as Umiltà of Faenza, Angela of Foligno, Catherine of Siena, and Margery Kempe could participate equally, dictating their theology to nuns and priests become their disciples, St Catherine even being proclaimed Doctor of the Church and then, with St Birgitta, Patron of Europe. Judaism and the Gospel celebrated littleness, the smallest Hebrew letter, yod, that beginning the names of God, Jesus and Jerusalem, and meaning hand, another letter, kaph, meaning the palm of the hand, while God is born as a baby in poverty in a stable in Bethlehem, dying on a gallows cross as a common criminal. Not only does it involve composing with words, but also their being written into books, such books being inscribed first on parchment, then on paper, first as manuscript, then in print, and bound between covers. The Beguines and the daughters of Nicholas Ferrar at Little Gidding will support themselves by binding such books. It is a tangible concrete linguistic theology where letters are things and also numbers, God creating the world with the Word, in number, weight and measure, 'Amen' being that which is said, which therefore is. It is opposed, as Augustine found, leading to his conversion, to Greek Neoplatonism's abstractions and hierarchies.

We shall find Aelred of Rievaulx, the Ancrene Wisse Author, Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton and the Cloud of Unknowing Author, writing to anchoresses, generally using Pseudo-Dionysius, while the women to whom they write have the example of Scholastica's 'holy disobedience' to her twin brother Benedict, the resulting dialogue of bass and treble voices permitting 'ecstatic conversations'. One such 'ecstatic conversation' is that between Saints Augustine and Monica, another, between Richard Rolle and Margaret Kirkby, another, between Henry Suso and Elsbeth Stägel. In the withdrawal from the world, the stripping away of external things, in these holy conversations, God is found - and shared. This 'cell of self knowledge and of God' was medieval psychiatry, was the soul-healing, rather than killing, was the Gospel, the 'Good News', that gave happiness. In the Gospels, Jesus seeks times of solitude and prayer, then returns to the world to carry out healing. He himself prayed the Psalms and the prophets, such as Isaiah. He taught the Lord's Prayer, which so echoes the Virgin's Magnificat, again bass and treble voices, of gender inclusion. When I was a novice I was told that his 'greatest gifts, apart from himself, are the Psalter and the Lord's Prayer'. Monasteries and anchorholds, for men and for women, created structures for that withdrawal for prayer, but with the concommittant responsibility for the healing of the souls, minds and bodies of all people of all walks of life.

We see, for instance, the illiterate lay woman, Margery Kempe, having read to her contemplative materials concerning Marie d'Oignies, Richard Rolle and Birgitta of Sweden. When the printing press was introduced in England, these contemplative texts were promptly readied for wider publication, with that intent, particularly by Brigittine Syon Abbey, but at the same time came the Reformation, causing texts being readied for type-setting to be blocked, as was the case with the Westminster Manuscript of Julian's Showing of Love, or even whole editions, every single volume, as was the case with Elizabeth Barton's 'Grete Boke', and even Elizabeth Barton OSB herself, destroyed, in her case by hanging at Tyburn in 1534. Similarly, the Bishop of Cambrai had destroyed all known copies of the Beguine Marguerite Porete's Speculum Simplicium Animarium, the Mirror of Simple Souls, then she herself had been burnt at the Sorbonne in 1310. These crucial texts were seen in England as a threat to the State, allied with the Church, first as seeming to be Lollard for permitting women a theological voice, then as Catholic in opposition to the Church of England, while in France, first Jean Gerson, Chancellor of the University of Paris, opposed these texts, particularly those by women, and then they were seen by the State and Church as partaking of the 'Quietist' heresy, finally the atheist French Revolution condemned nuns to the guillotine, seizing their contemplative 'superstitious' writings.

Our first writers followed in Christ's footsteps, both in books, in the Gospel, and in reality, on pilgrimage, re-imagining the events that had taken place at Bethlehem and Jerusalem, the Nativity, the Crucifixion. Later, cloistered women were discouraged from those pilgrimages, only the lay Birgitta of Sweden and Margery Kempe being able to do so, the others imaging them in their cells. We shall find images of pilgrims in Christina of Markyate, Walter Hilton and Augustine Baker. The Pseudo-Dionysian disciples, among them Meister Eckhart and the Cloud of Unknowing author, however, discouraged the nuns' affective imaging of Holy Land events. Convents would become, quite literally at the French Revolution, prisons. Countering their negativity, William Flete, Alfonso of Jaén and Adam Easton, a Norwich Benedictine and the Cardinal who effected Birgitta's canonization, praised women's contemplative writings and laid down rules for their acceptance as prophetic where their visions led to charity, to the love of God and neighbour. These 'ecstatic conversations' on the part of hermits and anchoresses led to great joy, even laughter, as we see in Richard Rolle, John Whiterig, the Cloud of Unknowing author and Julian of Norwich.

We shall first present the contemplatives who were read in England and throughout Latin Christendom, the precursors and models for our own, Augustine with Monica, Jerome with Paula and Eustochium, Arsenius, Boethius, Pseudo-Dionysius, Benedict, Scholastica and Gregory. We shall also present the later influences upon the English contemplatives of Continental Hildegard of Bingen (influenced by Anglo-Saxon Lioba), Marguerite Porete, Angela of Foligno, Mechtild of Hackeborn, the Friends of God, Henry Suso and Jan van Ruusbroec, Birgitta of Sweden and Catherine of Siena, from texts present in English manuscripts. We lack Mechitild of Magdebourg's entry into this tradition until Lucy Menzies' fine translation of her.

In the second part of this book, our truly English contemplatives, Christina of Markyate, Richard Rolle, John Whiterig, William Flete, the Cloud of Unknowing Author, Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, are presented, giving also their textual transmission in manuscripts written out by Brigittine and Benedictine nuns and recusants. Our touchstone will be the Amherst manuscript in which a Carmelite monk (perhaps Prior Richard Misyn), copies out for Margaret Heslyngton and perhaps, earlier, for a Carmelite anchoress, such as Dame Emma Stapleton, daughter of the Sir Miles Stapleton who is the executor of the Countess of Suffolk's Will leaving Julian of Norwich a legacy, magnificent contemplative texts. It contains writings by Richard Misyn, Richard Rolle, Marguerite Porete, Julian of Norwich, Jan van Ruusbroec, Henry Suso, Birgitta of Sweden, and, in another manuscript by the same scribe, Mechtild of Hackeborn.

The third section discusses English nuns in exile at the Reformation, among them first the Brigittines, then the Benedictines, Dame Margaret Gascoigne, Dame Gertrude More, Dame Catherine Gascoigne, Dame Barbara Constable, Dame Bridget More, Dame Clementia Cary, Dame Agnes More, as they carried out Father Augustine Baker's suggestions for editing and publishing in manuscript and in print the medieval contemplative texts, for treasuring these as their own monastic dowry and for sharing it with the English Mission.

We present these texts in their original languages in sequence (like James Joyce's Birth of Mrs Purefoy's Baby in the 'Oxen of the Sun' chapter to Ulysses, where we are regaled with the nine centuries of the English language, alongside the nine months' gestation of her child) so that this guide may be not only one to contemplation but also be a linguistic study through time, as is Fernand Mossè's most useful Handbook of Middle English.

In an epilogue we see this tradition alive today in the writing about and editing of these texts by Evelyn Underhill and Lucy Menzies, by Father Robert Llewellyn and Revd John Clark, these both Anglican priests, in the careful editorial publishing by Catholic James Hogg of the University of Salzburg, and in the practice of Julian and Ruusbroec's spirituality by Don Divo Barsotti of Settignano, and other labourers in the vineyard. Italian has the word 'intrecciato', meaning things being linked and braided together, being Lucretius' and John Livingston Lowes' 'hooked atoms'. We shall find this here in this anthology, strands being 'Arsenius', or 'pilgrim' or 'treadling', the little white stone with one's name, or the hazelnut in the palm of one's hand, or the whole cosmos shrunk into one ray of light.

An Anglican nun, I was staying at Kilcullen, County Kildare, in Ireland, amongst Catholic nuns, one of whom explained to me that England is 'Mary's Dowry'. I had come to work with Sister Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P., the editor of the extant manuscripts of Julian of Norwich. Together we discussed the opening of the Westminster Cathedral Manuscript of Julian, in which Mary's Advent contemplation, 'O Sapientia', of her as-yet-unborn Child, is mirrored in Julian's contemplation of Mary, and which in turn is mirrored in ourselves reading Julian and thus mirroring her in ourselves and through her, the Virgin and Child. Three times in Luke Mary treasures all these things in her heart. A Carthusian monk enters his cell through an ante-room called the 'Ave Maria', because of the significance of Mary and prayer.

This e-book thus presents an anthology of the contemplative writings, those written out in England, and then in exile from England, being treasured and copied out in turn by generations, across space and time, becoming the 'English Mission' to win back Mary's lost Dowry. Its Italian edition will be presented in parallel text, both in English and in Italian.


Florence

Christmas Day, 2007


Table of Contents

I. The Precursors

A. Helena and Constantine, Monica and Augustine, Jerome, Paula and Eustochium, Arsenius, Boethius, Dionysius the Areopagite, Benedict, Scholastica and Gregory

B. Lioba, Hildegard of Bingen, Marguerite Porete, Angela of Foligno, Mechtild of Hackeborn, Dante Alighieri, the Friends of God, Henry Suso, Jan van Ruusbroec, Birgitta of Sweden, Catherine of Siena

II. Medieval Irish and English Contemplatives

St Patrick's Lorica, 'The Cry of the Deer'

'The Dream of the Rood'

Christina of Markyate, Richard Rolle, John Whiterig, William Flete, Walter Hilton, the Cloud of Unknowing Author, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe

III. Their Preservers

A. The Brigittines Orcherd of Syon, Mirroure of Oure Lady

B. The Benedictines: Dames Margaret Gascoigne, Gertrude More, Catherine Gascoigne, Barbara Constable, Clementia Cary, Father Augustine Baker, Serenus Cressy, OSB

Epilogue


I. The Precursors

A. Helena and Constantine, Monica and Augustine, Jerome, Paula and Eustochium, Arsenius, Boethius, Dionysius the Areopagite, Benedict, Scholastica and Gregory

Helena (†327) and Constantine (†337)

et us begin with the Empress Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine. The official account of her life speaks of her as an Eastern princess, but in Celtic Britain the legends persist that she was a Christian British slave. She became Constantius' concubine and, A.D. 274, Constantine's mother. She was repudiated by the Emperor Constantius in 292, next treated with honour by Constantine when he was proclaimed Emperor, at York, in 302. Christianity was adopted by the Empire in 312. It could well be that his mother, like African Augustine's, had much to do with Constantine's conversion to Christianity. Constantine would establish the seat of Empire not in Rome but in Byzantium, Constantinople, on the shores of the Black Sea. Orthodox art before and after its iconoclastic phase, shows the Madonna and Child dressed in imperial garb, in Roman togas. This iconography doubly refers to Mary and Jesus, Helena and Constantine, palimpsested the one on the other. Both times, when iconoclasm is overturned, it is in turn carried out similarly by Empresses, Irene in 787 and Theodora in 843, as we witness in the British Museum's icon, the 1400 'The Triumph of Orthodoxy', showing the Regent Empress Theodora with her four-year-old son the Emperor Michael presiding at the restoration of the use of icons.


Helena, now Empress, visited the Holy Places, such as Bethlehem, Jerusalem and Sinai, determined where their churches would be built, and she and her son officially established for Christendom the cult of the Cross. However it is likely that the present Mount Sinai is not the true Sinai of Exodus but a mountain Helena decreed by fiat as Mount Sinai and that declaration is taken on faith by pilgrims to this day. Eusebius of Caesaria (260-339), their contemporary, wrote the account of Constantine and Helena's pilgrimages and building programmes in the Holy Places. Eusebius emphasizes Constantine as undertaking the excavations on Golgotha and building the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 335. Later legend will have this archeology and architecture be Helena's. Eusebius affirms Helena's actions in this area in connection with the Bethlehem cave and basilica and with that on the Mount of Olives. He touchingly describes how she wished, quoting Psalm 132.7, to 'worship at the place whereon his feet have stood.' He also describes how

Greek

Reading between Eusebius' lines we see that Helena, who died at eighty in 327, preceded, with her building programme at Bethlehem and the Mount of Olives, those of Constantine in Jerusalem; Eusebius noting that Constantine's programme there is partly in memory of his mother. Thus Helena, as Christian Empress, could give to later women and men in her own third and fourth centuries and in others, a pattern centered upon poverty and power, piety and pilgrimage. She lived out those words read from Isaiah by Christ in the synagogue at Nazareth.

  

Monica (†387) and Augustine (†430)

ugustine, Aurelius Augustinus, was born in Africa in A.D. 354 at a time when the Roman Empire was crumbling. He grappled with the conflicting beliefs of that uncertain era, coming to reject Neoplatonism and Manicheanism for Christianity, being converted in a garden outside Milan through reading Paul's Epistle. And his mother's tears. He had been a Professor of Rhetoric, of Literature, he now professed Christ, the Word. Edith Stein has written a beautiful dialogue between Ambrose and Augustine in her Three Dialogues. Augustine was baptised by Ambrose in 387. Returning to Africa he became Bishop of Hippo, dying as the Vandals were besieging his beloved cathedral city. In his Confessions he writes his spiritual biography, much as Julian does in her Showing of Love. In it he explains that sin is the tending to non-being, to diverging from God's Creation. In its Book XI Augustine presents a heady discourse upon Time and Eternity, based upon Ambrose's evening hymn.

Latin

Augustine wrote those lines in his homeland, in Africa; but earlier in Milan in Italy he had met Ambrose, then was converted and baptised by him. He had next set forth to journey home with his mother Monica but in Ostia the two of them had a vision together, a vision beyond time and even music, that informs Confessions XI. The two were discussing one night the Kingdom of Heaven.

Latin
In that moment they together touched and were touched by the eternal Wisdom. Shortly thereafter Monica, saying she desired no longer to live in this word, died. Julian, who herself echoed those words, when she came to her Anchorhold, lived across the street from an Augustinian Priory where this saint's works were read and studied. She would have heard the Austin Friars' chanting of Psalms and of Ambrose's 'Deus Creator Omnium'.
 


Jerome (†420), Paula (†404) and Eustochium (†419)

or was Helena the only European woman to visit the Holy Places in Africa and Asia during this period and to write letters describing her experiences. Let us also look at the Roman matron and widow Paula and her virgin daughter Eustochium. Paula and Eustochium wrote an important, joint, and most joy-filled letter to their friend in Rome, Marcella, published as Jerome's Epistola XLVI/46, in which they described their pilgrimage in A.D. 385 to the Holy Places, to Africa, to Israel, before settling down for the rest of their lives with Jerome in Bethlehem, financially supporting him and assisting his labours with translating the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin, the Vulgate text to which Egeria did not have access. We often see paintings of scarlet-clad Cardinal Jerome in his study at his labours, but his womenfolk are forgotten and omitted from those canvesses, except in two, one now in the National Gallery in London, but which was at San Girolamo in Fiesole, which shows the widowed Paula, at her side her most beautiful virgin daughter, Eustochium, and another by Francisco Zurburan and Workshop now in the National Gallery in Washington, and originally painted for the Hieronymite Order founded by Alfonso of Jaén's brother, and to which belonged the famous Sor Juana de la Cruz in Mexico City.

Paula movingly contrasts the wealth of Rome and the poverty of Bethlehem:

Latin

Paula has written a Christian Georgics, a Christian pastoral, though as if through the eyes of Karl Marx, Simone Weil, and Frantz Fanon. These insights into the injustices of privileged wealth bridge time; one can find them in the Prophets and the Gospels, in Horace and Juvenal, in Wyclif and More; but they are especially likely to be perceived by women who stand outside the structures of power, such as Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, and Nadine Gordimer. Her style is shaped by Cicero and Virgil, Horace and Juvenal; while her social thought is shaped by the Prophets, the Gospels and by Josephus. But in it she has also presented a discussion of the places she and her daughter physically visited in Jerusalem, Bethany, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Galilee, Cana, Tabgha, Capharnaum, Egypt and elsewhere, noting often the meanings of the Hebrew names of places and blending that philological knowledge with theology. Hebrew is a language centered upon the word, even the word for English's 'thing' being what is a spoken word, dabar, with the implication that all creation is God's Word and Adam's naming. Paula and Egeria grasp at that concept and for these women the names of places deeply involve the meaning of those names with the place.(24)

Paula's pilgrimage, like Egeria's, is a mapping out in time and space, using the Bible to understand the lands of the Bible. But Paula adds to Egeria's knowledge of the Bible in its Old Latin translation and her curiosity about Greek and comparative liturgy, her own knowledge not only of classical Latin but also of Greek and the Hebrew she is avidly studying. Helena, Egeria and Paula all use time and space, the book of the Bible and geography of the Holy Land as their Internet upon which to weave a web of links to sanctity, retrieving what is hallowed and hallowing.

Twenty years later, Jerome was to write another letter, his Epistola CVIII/108, praising Paula, and in it recapitulating the description of the pilgrimage that she had made. We learn much about Paula in Jerome's voluminous writings. He tells of her luxurious Roman life, her wealth, and her very great status. She, who had once always dressed in silks, and who had been used to being carried about Rome by her eunuch slaves so that her feet might never touch the ground, who was descended from Agamemnon, and whose husband was descended from Aeneas, had joined Marcella's group of high-born, wealthy Roman ladies, who together attempted to follow a life of monastic severity. Jerome became their teacher, expounding the Scriptures to them. But he quarrelled with Church officials in Rome most bitterly and found it expedient to return to Bethlehem. Paula and her daughter, Eustochium, joined him there, Paula leaving behind the rest of her children weeping on the quay. In the Holy Land Paula studied Hebrew so that she might sing the psalms, the chief early Christian devotional practice, in their original language and assist him in his translation work. She lived for twenty years in Bethlehem, dying there in A.D. 404. Paula and Eustochium's letter to Marcella pleads with their old friend that she leave Rome, called in the letter a 'Babylon,' and come to Jerusalem and its Holy Places. A noted Jerome scholar remarks that this letter is 'written in the name of Paula and her daughter but manifestly by Jerome himself, to Marcella,' then goes on to say, 'It is an idyllic piece, relating spiritual serenity and contentment . . . and stands in striking contrast to the querulous, vituperative note' of Jerome's typical writings. We find other male scholars making the same statements of Heloise's letters, that they are Abelard's, yet that they are in a totally different style than his.

The letter in question is Epistola XLVI. It describes Paula's pilgrimages to all these Holy Places in such a way as to have Marcella participate in their sacred journeying, mentally, and vicariously, in her imagination. Paula and Eustochium begin their letter by stating that, although the Crucifixion may have made Jerusalem an accursed place, there is ample scriptural justification for Christians to return to that holy city. Paula relies not only on the Scriptures and upon her growing knowledge of Hebrew but also upon Cicero for her arguments, describing both St. Paul speaking of his need to return to Jerusalem and Cicero speaking of his need to learn one's Greek not only in Sicily but in Athens, one's Latin not in Lilybaeum but in Rome. She adds, in a capstone to her argument, that Jerusalem is 'our Athens.' She then quotes Virgil's First Eclogue on the great distance of the British Isles from Rome in noting that Christian Gauls and Britons all make haste to come, not to Rome, but to far Jerusalem. Jerome is also fond of this phrase, but states it the opposite way: ' Et de Hierosolymis et de Britannia aequaliter patet aula coelestis: regnum enim dei intra nos est,' Epistola LVIII. Chaucer may have had it in mind with his Wife of Bath, who so often speaks of Jerome. Jerome writes the letter in 404 after Paula's death, giving Paula's vita to her virgin daughter, Eustochium. In contrast to Paula's letter to Marcella, Jerome's account of the pilgrimage Paula made is almost barren of references to classical authors. He does, however, mention the ' fables of the poets', de fabulis Poetarum , in giving the tale of Andromeda chained to a rock, as happening at Joppa, which he notes was also the harbor of the fugitive Jonah. He had earlier cited some lines of the Aeneid concerning the Greek Isles. But, unlike Paula, he does not show off his classical learning. He is here being more Christian than Ciceronian. (We recall his dream in which he is chided, or chides himself, by being told, 'Thou art not a Christian. Thou art a Ciceronian.'  But it is full of descriptions of her great piety and of her deep emotional participation in the past drama of the present places which she visits. He feminizes her. He is writing in her praise as had Valerius in that of Egeria. The letter waxes most sentimental about her parting from her family members, describing her as torn between the love of her children and her love for God.

Jerome in Epistola CVIII/108 notes Paula's deep, affective piety at the Cross and the Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and at the cave and church in Bethlehem, which she had not particularly stressed herself. He amplifies her previous words to Marcella and speaks of her as prostrating herself before the Cross, almost seeing upon it the hanging body of the Lord, as she prays, and as kissing the stones, the one which the angel had rolled away and the one in the Holy Sepulchre on which the Lord had lain. Then he describes her entering into the cave of the Nativity, weeping and as if seeing the Virgin wrapping the Child in swaddling clothes and placing him in the manger between the ox and the ass written of in the Prophets, the Magi adoring him, the star shining above, the Mother nursing the Child, the shepherds coming by night and seeing the Word which was made flesh as John wrote in the beginning of his Gospel:

n principio erat verbum et verbum caro factum est.'

One should note that Jerome, Paula and Eustochium lived in the adjacent cave, which one can still see today, reached by a passage from that of the Nativity, beneath the sanctuary in the Empress Helena's Bethlehem basilica.

Jerome's account in Epistola CVIII/108 ends by saying, and unconsciously echoing Valerius concerning Egeria:

Latin

It is an interesting relationship, that between Paula and Jerome. We should not forget that Chaucer will play upon it when he writes the Wife of Bath's Prologue, in which he has the Wife, in her scarlet garb, visit the same Holy Places as did St. Paula, and has her constantly cite, not classical authors, but St. Jerome, especially his treatise, Adversus Jovinianum, his diatribe against marriage and widowhood, in which he advocates, as he also did in a letter to Paula's daughter Eustochium, perpetual virginity.


Arsenius (†450)

rsenius, born in 354 into Roman Senatorial rank, was selected as imperial tutor to Theodosius' sons, Arcadius and Honorius, arriving in Constantinople in 383, teaching there for eleven years. Agonizing amidst the splendour of the court one day he heard a voice saying, 'Arsenius, flee the company of men, and thou shalt live'. So he left, going to Alexandria and into the desert of Nitria.There he counselled the staying in one's cell for prayer, work and sustenance. It is said of him that at sunset on the Sabbath he would raise his hands in prayer, until the dawn light of Sunday shone upon his face. One brother looked through the window to see Arsenius standing in his cell in prayer, his whole body afire. It is said that because at court he had worn the finest, softest clothes, as a hermit he wore the meanest garb, and that he hid behind a pillar in church so that his white hair and beard not be seen. Similarly he let the water in which he soaked the rushes for basket become rank to compensate for the perfumes to which he had been accustomed. Arsenius would say, 'The monk is a stranger in a foreign land: let him not occupy himself with anything there and he will find rest'. He also said, 'If we seek God he will be revealed to us; if we laid hold on him he will remain with us'. On an occasion a brother said to Abba Arsenius, 'How is it that you who have much learning, both Greek and Latin, ask questions about the thoughts of humble Egyptian villagers'. Arsenius replied, 'With Greek and Latin learning I am acquainted, but I have not yet learned the alphabet of these villagers'. The Sayings of the Holy Fathers gives, 'It is right for a monk to live even as Abba Arsenius lived. Take care each day to stand before God without sin, and draw nigh unto him with tears as did the sinful woman, and pray to God as if he were before you, for he is near and looks carefully upon you'. Once a lawyer came to tell Arsenius he had been left a large sum of money in a will. Arsenius replied, 'I died before he did'. Abba Anthony told his disciples of Abba Arsenius and Abba Moses, that when a monk went to Abba Arsenius concerning the silent life of contemplation, he neither set a table for him nor gave him refreshment. Then he went to the blessed Abba Moses and he both welcomed him and gave him refreshment. Next in a vision he saw Abba Arsenius in a ship with the Spirit of God who was travelling with him. He also saw Abba Moses in a ship filled with angels. Thus it was understood that the life of silent contemplation was exalted above alms and ministrations as was the conduct of Matthew the Evangelist above that of Zacchaus the tax-gatherer. Often cited by our writers in this volume, in the Amherst manuscript, and in the writings of Dame Gertrude More, is his saying, 'That I have spoken I have many times repented, that I held my peace, I have never repented'.


Boethius (†524)

oethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, was born about A.D. 480. A Christian, he also knew all the classical and pagan works of philosophy written by Plato and Aristotle, Parmenides and Pythagoras, Cicero and Seneca, and he reconciled these to Christian theology in his own writings. He was a Roman Senator, defending the ancient principles of their Republic, but was thrown into prison by the barbarian Emperor Theodoric where he awaited a most brutal form of execution, ropes to be bound around his head till his eyes burst out and then to be finished off by the bludgeon and the axe, A.D. 524. During that time he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy, which is modeled upon the biblical books of Job and Wisdom and upon the Platonic dialogues about Socrates while he was awaiting execution in Athens. Boethius in this work presents Philosophia as a beautiful woman who consoles Boethius (she is really his wiser self) for his foolish and mawkish self-pitying. She gets him to recover from his depression by telling him of Time and Eternity, Creation and Creator, Man and God, the Circle and the Centre. She is his and our psychiatrist.

His book was treasured up for centuries, only falling out of favour at the Age of Reason. King Alfred translated it into Old English, Jean de Meun translated it into French, Chaucer translated it into Middle English. Queen Elizabeth I translated it into Elizabethan English. Dante, Chaucer and Julian of Norwich all used its concepts and were all deeply influenced by it. Boethius' Consolation is a key to understanding medieval poetry and Christian theology. It is also a 'golden book' as Edward Gibbon called it, that can be of use to disordered souls in our own moment in time.

The work is written in sections, divided between Prose and Poetry. Medieval manuscripts of the text are richly illuminated, presenting Boethius in prison, mourning on his bed, and visited by the Lady Philosophia, and from her Dante derived his consoling figure of Beatrice.

  

Pseudo-Dionysius (†VI century)

hristianity, for centuries, believed that a late fifth-century, early sixth-century theologian was, as he pretended to be, that Dionysius the Areopagite whom Paul converted, along with the woman Damaris, at Athens (Acts 17.22-34). The Neoplatonist Pseudo-Dionysius wrote magnificent treatises, Julian of Norwich quoting from him three times in her Showing of Love. His manuscripts had been given by the Emperor Michael the Stammerer in A.D. 827 to King Louis the Pious. John Scotus translated them in 862, Anastasius, the papal librarian, commenting on the text in 875. Abbot Suger of St Denis (Saint Dionysius) commenced Gothic architecture through using Dionysius' theology in stone, lead and glass.

Gothic Architecture, Norwich Cathedral

But Abelard, while a monk at St Denis, denounced Dionysius's identity as fraudulent. Meanwhile, the Victorines also discovered and used the Dionysian corpus of writings. Cardinal Adam Easton, the brilliant Benedictine of Julian's Norwich, owned the complete works of Pseudo-Dionysius, in a fine thirteenth-century manuscript giving some of the Greek text as well as all the Latin translation, the invocation to the Trinity being most beautifully illuminated with a gold-leafed, intertwined 'T' at folio 108v. That manuscript is today, Cambridge Ii.III.32. Meanwhile, the Cloud of Unknowing Author (but whom I suspect to have been Adam Easton writing to Julian), translated the Mystic Theology into Middle English as Deonise Hid Diuinite for a woman contemplative. To do so he converted the Trinity into an invocation to divine and feminine Wisdom.

Dionysius also, similarly as had Boethius, spoke of God at the centre, 'All the radii of a circle are brought together in the unity of the centre', Adam Easton annotating those lines in his manuscript now at Cambridge.
 
 

Benedict (†547), Scholastica (†before 547) and Gregory (†604)

regory the Great (c. 540-604) wrote an account of the Life and Miracles of St Benedict (c.480-547), casting these in the form of Dialogues between himself and Peter, a fellow monk. In these Dialogues there is a most moving account of Benedict and of his twin sister Scholastica and how she is able to force her brother to break his Rule and stay over night at her convent at Subiaco so that they may converse all night upon God. She prays to God for a storm which he grants. Three days later she dies.

That account is followed by one of Benedict's vision of God as greater than all his Creation. He is standing in prayer at a window of a great tower, apart from his sleeping disciples, when suddenly there is a great light, greater than that of the sun. As he marvels he suddenly sees as it were the whole world collected into one ray of light before his eyes.

Gregory and Peter discuss that vision, Gregory explaining that to the soul who sees the Creator all Creation becomes small, 'animae uidenti creatorem angusta est omnis creatorem'. He goes on to explain that it is not that the world contracts, but that the soul, seeing God, expands above the world, becoming greater than itself. 'Quod autem collectus mundus ante eius oculos dicitur, non caelum et terra contracta est, sed uidentis animus dilatatus, qui, in deo raptus, uidere sine difficultate potuit omne quod infra deum est'. And he further discourses upon the interior light and that of the eyes in this vision. The male abbot has experienced Mary's Magnificat in his prayers. 'My soul doth magnify the Lord'. Smallness become largeness; darkness, light; humility, power.

Gregory's Dialogues was, of course, a staple in Benedictine circles. The lovely dialogue, within the Dialogues, following upon this one of Benedict's vision of God, was of the twin brother and sister, and which is sung antiphonally on the feast day of Benedict and Scholastica by Benedictines, celebrating the breaking of their sacred Rule. And that served to make Benedict's following vision concerning prayer the more memorable.

Christina of Markyate refers to Benedict's vision, where she sees in a flash of light the whole world.

And Julian of Norwich refers to it - and especially in connection with the Virgin at the Annunciation and Nativity,

and with the hazelnut passage,

and then again and again fugally throughout her text.

For Julian, whose anchorhold at St Julian's Church is under the Benedictines of Carrow Priory, who are in turn under the Benedictines of Norwich Cathedral Priory, is seeped in Benedictinism. It is possible that her Benedictinism is taught her by the brilliant Norwich Benedictine Adam Easton. It is even possible that Adam Easton might be her brother, might even be her twin.

B. St Lioba, Hildegard of Bingen, Marguerite Porete, Angela of Foligno, Mechtild of Hackeborn, Dante Alighieri, the Friends of God, Henry Suso, Jan van Ruusbroec, Birgitta of Sweden, Catherine of Siena

n Early Christianity, in Ireland and England, hermits, contemplatives, paralleling those of the Egyptian and Syrian deserts, were known as the Celi Dei , the Friends of God. This name is also frequent in later contemplative movements and writings. At the same time that Julian of Norwich, Walter Hilton and the author of the Cloud of Unknowing were formulating their contemplative texts in England, other mystics were writing on the Continent. As in England, women were present alongside men in this project, this textual community stretching over most of Europe. Meister Eckhart had available to him the writings of Hildegard von Bingen, as had also John Tauler those of Mechtild von Magdebourg, and those of Marguerite Porete. Associated with Meister Eckhart was Agnes of Hungary, with Henry Suso, Elsbeth Stägel, while John Tauler likewise preached to Dominican nuns and Jan van Ruusbroec wrote spiritual treatises to them. That sense of women belonging to the 'Friends of God' (Wisdom 7.27, James 2.23) as well as men may have had its origins in the Christianizing of Germany from England by Anglo-Saxon monks and nuns, influenced by the Celi Dei, and who established double monasteries, St Hilda's Whitby, St Lioba's Bischopsheim and countless others. At first the mysticism, or contemplation, is Benedictine. Then it becomes strongly Dominican. Associated with it are also the women Beguines, such as Margaret Porete and Mechtild of Magdebourg. This booklet traces the lives and works of the God Friends, recognising that three of their texts, Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls, Jan van Ruusbroec's Sparkling Stone and an extract of Henry Suso's Horologium Sapientiae, are found together with Julian's Showing of Love in the Amherst Manuscript in the British Library and that these other works may well have been translated for her and thus constituted her Library of Mystics from which she partly drew her inspiration.

Lioba (†781)

t Boniface travelled from England to Germany proselytizing amongst the pagan tribes there and establishing monasteries for both men and women. St Lioba, St Boniface's kinswoman, was a nun in Wessex who had studied under Mother Tetta (in secular life, Cuthberga, sister of the King of Wessex, wife of the King of Northumbria). Boniface sent for Lioba to come to Germany, because she was a skilled Classicist, learned in the Scriptures, the Church Fathers, canon law and the decrees of all the councils. In fact, she was never without a book in her hand, reading at every possible opportunity and she never forgot what she read. Her name 'Lioba' means 'Beloved'. Boniface asked that her bones be laid by his at her death. Charlemagne's wife adored her but Lioba hated the life of court like poison.

Latin

Her life tells, among others, this story: 'She had a dream in which one night she saw a purple thread issuing from her mouth. It seemed to her that when she took hold of it with her hand and tried to draw it out there was no end to it. . . When her hand was full of thread and it still issued from her mouth she rolled it round and round and made a ball of it .' An old and prophetic nun was asked about the meaning of the dream and explained that it referred to Lioba's wise counsels spoken from her heart. 'Furthermore, the ball which she made by rolling it round and round signifies the mystery of the divine teaching, which is set in motion by the words and deeds of those who give instruction and which turns earthwards through active works and heavenwards through contemplation, at one time swinging downwards through compassion for one's neighbour, again swinging upwards through the love of God.'

The image of the ball of purple thread in Lioba's hand is similar to Julian's hazel nut in the palm of her hand.
 

Hildegard of Bingen (†1179)

From the Lucca Manuscript

                                 Deus creavit mundum
                                 non facio illi iniuriam,
                                 sed volo uti illo.

      Hildegard, Ordo Virtutum
ildegard of Bingen, and other women like her, such as Hrotswitha of Gandesheim (A.D. 932-1000) and Herrad of Landesburg, followed in the learned Benedictine tradition established in German-speaking countries from England, such as with St Leoba, which gave women the status of Christian equality with men. Hildegard composed music and wrote treatises on medicine, on Benedict's Rule, a play, many letters, and visionary mystical works which she also illuminated in a manner that is deeply compelling. But, unlike Lioba, she was not a pleasing person. Until the age of forty she kept to her bed. Richardis, her friend and fellow nun, then persuaded her to embark on her career as writer of letters to the leaders of Church and State in her day and to compose her mystical treatises. When Richardis left her to become an abbess at another monastery Hildegard was furious, demanding her return. Richardis, obediently, died. Hildegard ruled her monastery by means of tyrannising over her nuns with her migraines - about which she writes in her medical works and whose effect she illuminates in her mystical treatises. She is an example of a genius who is less than charitable. One admires her work, but not her desire for control. She has significant prophetic messages for us today.

We need to see Hildegard's play, the Ordo Virtutum, in its contexts, first of monastic obedience, then of flesh and blood reality concerning disobedience behind its morality, the tragedy of Hildegard's companion, Richardis von Stade, and lastly the surrounding text in which it first was found, the Scivias, especially the final section, and other writings by Hildegard which enclosed this central drama in her thought and her life. Hildegard's Ordo Virtutum is the celebration of Obedience following upon a period of revolt. It is the story not so much of a prodigal son as of a prodigal daughter.

In real life there was such a prodigal daughter, Richardis von Stade, the much loved fellow nun who had colluded with and nursed Hildegard in her illness of not only the customary migraines but even bouts of blindness and paralysis at the time when she sought to leave Disibodenberg in order to found Rupertsberg. Richardis had encouraged Hildegard in her writing of Scivias, begun in 1141. Perhaps she recognized that this was psychotherapy for her abbess. The partly completed text of Scivias, Bernard's interest in it, and Richardis' family influence enabled Pope Eugenius III to grant papal recognition to Hildegard at the Synod of Trier and also made possible the move to Rupertsberg. At this time the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa had a secret interview concerning prophecy with Hildegard, the Sibyl of the Rhine, at his royal palace at Ingelheim. It is very likely that these clustered actions took place through the influence of Richardis von Stade and her powerful family in their attempt to save Hildegard's life.

Then Adelheid was elected abbess of Gandesheim in 1152, Richardis having been elected abbes of Bassum in 1151. Hildegard had bitterly opposed Richardis' election which would take her way from her, and she ungratefully took the case to her family and to the pope. Adelheid's election was not so disturbing to her. The Archbishop of Bremen, Richardis' brother, have been forced to write to Hildegard to break the news to her of Richardis' sudden death on 29 October 1151. He told her that his sister when dying had stated her intention of returning to Hildegard and Rupertsberg. Hildegard, answering his letter, described Richardis in words that echo and mirror those of the Ordo Virtutum and its surrounding text in the Scivias; there are also echoes of another letter written to a woman who had abandoned being a nun and to whom Hildegard had referred as a prodigal son. In all these writings Hildegard stressing her outrage at women's disobedience, used the Benedictine emphasis upon Ordo, even to the extent of paraphrasing Benedict's Rule, while describing the serpent, the devil, in Virgilian terms borrowed from the Aeneid, Book II, to give vent to her personal emotions.

Perhaps within that rage is Hildegard's envy of Richardis' freedom. Her headaches and invalidism could indicate suppressed fury. She herself tended to recover from serious illness through being disobedient. She had been presented to Disibodenberg as a child of eight, and took her vows of perpetul virginity and obedience very early in life. Obedience, Ordo, is central to her life and art. Yet her writings are full of sexual curiosity and lore, this material granting her writings some of their most powerful images. Yet she disobeyed Disibodenberg in founding St Rupertsberg. Yet she herself would defy St Paul against women preaching, and she would herself preach at Trier - like Mary Magdalen's legendary preaching in Provence. Mary Magdalen being perceived in monasticism as having been the first contemplative, the model for monastic life - though Hildegard oddly compared her love for Richardis to that of Paul for Timothy. Yet she would even, in 1178, when she was eighty, defy the Church concerning the burial of a young nobleman and would face six months of excommunication. Yet her music disobeys, to its glory, the acceptable and expected intervals of Gregorian chant. Not for nothing did Goethe, who knew her work, echo her love of viriditas with his Faustian 'Grey, dear Friend, is all theory,/ And green is life's golden tree'.

In the play, but only in play, not in reality, the Anima/ Richardis returns to Queen Humility/ Abbess Hildegard, the ugly shouted words of the Devil giving way to the chanted symphony of the Virtues and the returned Soul - an alternative and comedic ending to the tragic story. The scenes of the Soul and of the chained Devil are splendidly illuminated in the now lost Scivias codex. It could well be that had it not been for Richardis' disobedience, first to the concept of women's helplessness, then to the concept of her dependency upon another, and finally Richardis' choice of death as freedom from Hildegard's tyranny, the writings, the music and the illuminations we so treasure today could not have come into being. They are like the pearl of great price: they inscribe, chant and illumine the Kingdom of Heaven. Let us now conclude with Hedwig's vision of Hildegard walking in the cloister which she had built, singing her own sequence O virga ac diadema.


Mechtild of Hackeborn (1298)

ertrude of Hackeborn was elected Abbess of Helfta in 1251 at nineteen. Her sister, Mechthild of Hackeborn, like Mechtild of Magdebourg, wrote visionary works. And so did another nun who entered the convent, Gertrude the Great. Their visions are largely based on Bernard and the Song of Songs and filled with eroticism and the Body of Christ, in particular, his Sacred Heart. Julian is to borrow some of that imagery in her Showing of Love for the scene where Christ shows her the wound in his side, as he had earlier shown it to Doubting Thomas, to affirm his love for his Creation. The scribe of her Amherst Short Text Showing of Love also is the scribe of Mechtild of Hackeborn's Book of Ghostly Grace in Middle English. The seventeenth-century English Benedictine nuns in exile  consciously took Helfta as their model, the very young Helen More taking the name in religion of 'Gertrude' with that awareness.


Angela of Foligno
(†1309)

ngela of Foligno, a Franciscan tertiary, who did not really choose to live in a physical cloister or a physical cell, spoke of the fruits of contemplation as being where one's soul becomes a room, a cell, in which one finds the All Good, finds the entire Creation. This account, written down at her dictation by Fra Arnaldo, her confessor and spiritual director, often clandestinely, gives: 'anima mea est una camera . . . est ibi . . . omne bonum'.

She also speaks of this state of welcoming Christ in the Eucharist within the soul with his heavenly host as being both 'thrones' and 'cities', concepts Julian repeats in her own writing, in the First, Long and Short Texts, and in reported discourse in Margery's writing, the Oral Text. Angela will even, in the Instructions, use the same image as had Christina of Markyate, of Christ as Pilgrim, coming to one's soul, one cell of self knowledge. Yet in her Instructions she also claims that she hypocritically enclosed herself in her room in Lent to impress people and win esteem, and that in her cell and her soul the devil lurked. Though following that introduction, not merely of humility, but humiliation, not merely of contempt but vituperation, she then speaks of truth and wisdom seated in her soul, a passage Julian of Norwich will echo: And then in Instruction XIV, she writes to her Franciscan disciples, echoing Arsenius, that 'There are only two things in the world that I find pleasure in speaking about, namely, knowledge of God and self, and remaining continually in one's cell. . . . I believe that anyone who does not know how to stay put and remain in a cell ought not to go anywhere.' In Instruction XXIX, the material crescendoes with an entire Chapter on the Knowledge of God and Oneself, exactly as in Julian's texts: Finally, the Franciscans preparing her Book of Angela of Foligno following her death conclude with noting that the apostles, who preached Christ's life, learned from a woman that he was raised from the dead to life, and that St Jerome had cited the Prophetess Huldah, to whom crowds ran, that the gift of prophecy had been transmitted to the female sex to shame men who are doctors of the Law but who transgress God's commandments. Mechtild of Magdebourg's Flowing Light of the Godhead was similarly defended by Dominican Heinrich von Halle writing of Deborah's practice of solitary contemplation from which to prophesy to the people of Israel and of Huldah's prophecy to the king Josias.

Perhaps Franciscan Angela of Foligno helped shaped Dominican Catherine of Siena's and Benedictine Julian of Norwich's concept of a 'Cell of Self-Knowledge'. Certainly the English Benedictine nuns in exile at Cambrai and Paris were copying out her text as well as Julian's. A small manuscript by them, Bibliothèque Mazarine 1202, titled 'Colections', finished 23 July 1724, on pages 21-22, gives:

And a manuscript at the Bodleian Library, Laud 46, at folios 70 verso and 72 recto, brings together excerpts from Marguerite Porete's Liber speculum animarum simplicium, her Mirror of Simple Souls, and the Libellus de vita et doctrina Angelae de Fulgineo , The Book of Angela of Foligno.

Marguerite Porete (1310)

arguerite Porete, like Mechtild of Magdebourg, was a Beguine. She, too, was influenced by the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius. She wrote her magnum opus, The Mirror of Simple Souls, presenting Pseudo-Dionysius' negative theology as a dialogue between the Soul who sends to a distant Emperor, God, her portrait, and Love and Reason. In the text she states that in such a state of contemplative love of God the soul has no need of masses or prayers or of anything else. She also gives the Pseudo-Dionysian principle of evil as nought, as nothing, as non-existence. First her book was publicly burned by the Bishop of Cambrai at Valenciennes, then she was tried in Paris by the Inquisition and herself burnt at the stake in 1310, the people weeping because of her great learning and goodness. The theology faculty at the Sorbonne had united against her, amongt them Nicholas of Lyra, the converted Jew, whose commentary on the Apocalypse would influence Magister Mathias and through him Birgitta of Sweden. A friend struggled to protect her, calling himself the Angel of Philadelphia, but was forced to recant and burn his habit and belt, living the rest of his life in a monastic prison. Later we hear of Jean Gerson attacking both Marguerite Porete, whom he misnames as Marie of Valenciennes, for 'her incredibly subtle book', and Jan van Ruusbroec. Some copies of her manuscript survived, including three translated into English, one of which is in the same manuscript as is the earliest extant Julian's Showing of Love manuscript in the British Library, the Amherst Manuscript, which is written by a Lincolnshire scribe circa 1435-1450, perhaps earlier, and which emphatically states that this version of Julian's text, the Short Text, was written out in 1413 when she was still alive. The contents of this manuscript, apart from its initial two texts which are translations made by Richard Misyn, a Lincoln Carmelite, for an anchoress, Margaret Heslyngton, from texts written by Richard Rolle in Latin for other women contemplatives, one of them also an anchoress named Margaret, may represent Julian's own contemplative library. The Amherst Manuscript includes as well the Henry Suso excerpts from the Horologium Sapientiae and the Jan van Ruusbroec, Sparkling Stone, which are given here on this Juliansite. It is possible that Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls, present in this same manuscript, was a part of Julian's own anachoritic library and that it influenced her. She departs from Marguerite Porete, however, in being actively concerned for her even-Christians, rather than Quietist.



Dante Alighieri (1321) 

ante Alighieri, like Julian, lived in the fourteenth-century, and was as deeply influenced as was she by these three mystic theologians. He embedded the principle of Love, spoken of by all three, as the controlling force of his Commedia as it is of the Cosmos, ' l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle'. And in Vita Nuova XII, he had described God as Love saying to him, 'Ego tamquam centrum circuli, cui simili modo se habent circumferentie partes; tu autem non sic.' [I am as at the centre of the circle, equidistant from all parts, but you are not'.]

Dante and Julian both share in the sense of the Trinity as Divine Power, Wisdom and Love (Inferno III), both share, by way of Marguerite Porete, in the theology of Mary as paradoxically Mother and Daughter of her Creator, 'figlia del tuo figlio' (Paradiso XXXIII).

It is not likely that Julian was influenced by Dante except, perhaps, through Cardinal Adam Easton, who quotes from him in his own writings. What is important is that they share the same principles derived from these preceding mystic theologians, participating in a past 'Internet' of God's Wisdom. Common also to many of these mystics, these Friends of God, is the sense of drawing apart, as to Mount Tabor with Christ, only to descend the Mountain again to be with all people in God's image, to be both chosen and universal, to treasure these things in their heart as had Mary, their task to seek Wisdom, amongst women and amongst men, and with her to be part of God's sweet ordering of the cosmos.

All these writers, Augustine, Boethius, Dionysius, Dante and Julian, are influenced by the Hebraic and feminine figure of God's Wisdom, God's Daughter.

The Friends of God, Henry Suso, Jan van Ruusbroec

Henry Suso (1366)

enry Suso was born in Switzerland about 1296, entering the Dominican monastery at fifteen. Five years later, after much guilt and excessive asceticism (including inscribing Jesus' name over his heart upon his flesh with his writing stylus), he was 'converted', giving his heart to the love of Eternal Wisdom. He worked with Meister Eckhart at Cologne after 1320 and wrote the Book of Divine Truth in defense of Eckhart's teachings. Suso was then himself forbidden to teach, though he continued to write, and he wandered about, in close contact with John Tauler, Henry of Nordlingen and other 'Friends of God'. Elsbeth Stägel, a Dominican nun at Töss, wrote his Life and received assistance from him as the 'Servant' on interpreting Eckhart's writings.

Einsiedeln, Cod. 710 (322), fol. 89, Henry Suso and Elsbeth Stagel sheltering under cloak of Sapientia

The Horologium Sapientiae ('Clock of Wisdom', the 'Computer of Wisdom'), was written in 1339. Henry Suso died at Ulm, 1366. Immensely popular throughout Europe this work was translated into other languages.

Henry Suso's Horologium Sapientiae, in British Library, Add. 37,790, fols. 135v-136v, presents part of Chapter Four's dialogue between Wisdom and the Disciple. British Library, Add. 37,790, the Amherst Manuscript, also contains Julian of Norwich's Showing of Love, Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls, Jan van Ruusbroec's Sparkling Stone, and works by Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton and Birgitta of Sweden. It may have been copied out by Richard Misyn himself for the recluse Margaret Heslyngton, and these earlier layers of the manuscript could have even been written as early as circa 1413, and represent Julian's own contemplative library. One may be reading what she once read.

Both Henry Suso and Richard Rolle stress Jesus ' name, Suso inscribing it upon his own flesh over his heart with his writing stylus, Rolle wearing it as an embroidered badge upon his hermit's garb, Charles de Foucauld as a hermit using a similar practice in our own century. Women were more likely to centre such a concept upon the heart of Jesus, as did Mecthild of Hackeborn, whose Book of Ghostly Grace in British Library, Egerton 2006, is copied out by the same scribe as that of this Amherst Manuscript, and as did Julian of Norwich herself.

There is a Carol sung each Christmas in Germany, said in its legend to have been sung by the Angels when they danced with Henry Suso.

The concluding reference in this text to the Desert Father Arsenius is also to be found in the booklet 'Colections', seized at the French Revolution. Manuscripts of this text by Henry Suso are sometimes illuminated with Henry Suso, who was Swiss, and his translator together gazing upon the medieval form of a computer, an elaborate Swiss clock, presented to us by the figure of God as female Wisdom. The rubrication here follows that in the Amherst Manuscript.


A Brief Formula for the Spiritual Life:

N the fellowship of saints which as the morning stars
shone in the dark night of this world and as the sun and moon
shed forth the beams of their clear knowledge you shall find some who
surpassingly were perfectly grounded not only in active life and virtue but
also in contemplation, of whose teaching and example you may take
the most perfect doctrine and love of true spiritual life. And nevertheless I
willingly and condescendingly to your youth and inexperience shall give you
some principles of spiritual living for a memory to have always
at hand to set you in the right working if you desire
to have the perfection of spiritual life that is to be desired by all men
and if you will and desire to take it up manfully you shall first
withdraw from ill fellowship and harmful company of all men who would
hinder you from your good purpose, seeking always opportunity when and what
time you may retire and there take privy silence for contemplation
and flee from the perils and turbulance of this harmful world. Always it
belongs to you first to study to have cleanness of heart, that is to say
that you keep your sensory perceptions turned into yourself and there you have as much as is
possible the doors of your heart busily closed from the

[Fol. 136]

forms of outward things and images of earthly things. Truly
among all other spiritual exercises cleanness of heart has the sovereignty,
as a final intent and reward of all the travails that a chosen knight of Christ is to receive.
Also you must lessen your affections from all your business about all the things that might
hinder your freedom from such a thing that in any manner has might and power to bind and
draw down your affection to it. As it is written in Moses' Law, 'Remain living in your own
dwelling and do not go out your door on the day of the Sabbath. Every man shall live by himself and
no man go out through the door of his house upon the Sabbath day'. This is as much as to say
that for a man to dwell with himself is to gather all the various
thoughts and affections of his heart and have them knit together into
one true and sovereign good, that is God. And to keep the Sabbath is
to have your heart free and unburdened from all fleshly affections that might
defoul the soul and from all worldly cares and business that might distress
it and so rest sweetly in peace of heart as in the haven of silence and
the love and feeling of his Creator God. Above all other things, let
this be your principal intent and business, that you always have your soul
and your mind lifted up to contemplation of heavenly things, so that
frail earthly things be left, to be continually drawn up to
the things that are above and what thing so ever it be that is different
from this, though it seem great in itself as chastising of the body, fasting,
vigils, and such like exercises of virtue, they shall be taken
and considered as secondary and less worthy and only so much expedient
and profitable as they profit and help to cleanness of heart. And there
fore it is that so few go on to perfection for they waste their time and their
strength in mean things that are not greatly profitable and the due
remedies they leave and discard. But if you desire to know the
right way to fulfil your intent you shall sovereignly desire
to continual cleanness of heart and rest of spirit and tranquillity and
to have your heart lastingly lifted up to God.
Disciple: Who is he who in this mortal body may always be knit to
that spiritual contemplation?

Wisdom: There may be no deadly manner always fasten and
set into this contemplation but from this cause, as said earlier,
that you may know. Where you shall fasten and solemnly set the
intention of the spirit and to what mark you shall always draw
the beholding of your soul when at that time the mind may
get them he will be glad and when he is distracted and drawn
away then he is sorry and sighs often as he feels himself
separated from that beholding. But if by chance you will ever turn against
me and say that you may not long abide and dwell in one's man's state
you shall know and understand that the power of God may do
and work more than any man may think. Therefore it falls
often that that thing that a man binds him to at the beginning
with a manner of violence and difficulty, afterwards he shall

[Fol. 136v]

do it lightly and at last with great liking, if he continue and
leave not what he has first begun. Hear now, my dear son,
the teaching of your father. Heed carefully my words and
write them in your heart as into a book. Follow not the multitude
of those who go back to the desires and lusts of their hearts
in which devotion is slackened, charity grows cold and meek obedience
is cast aside, in those who covet to be over other men in
prelacy and busily seek esteem and delicacies for the stomach,
desiring overmuch gifts and questing rewards that in this
world are gained, which they covet for as reward of their work. But
in another world they shall be left empty of everlasting
joy. And therefore follow not this manner of people but take
heed busily to the worthy flowers, that is the holy Fathers, that
spread about the sweet odour of the sovereign holiness and busy
yourself to take the purpose with like intent and conversation as is now
shown to you. Wherefore, whether you eat or drink or any other
thing do it late. Ever this voice of your sweet father sounds in your
ears saying, 'My son, turn again into thy heart. Withdraw
yourself from all outward things as much as
is possible to you and with a fervent love cleave ever to the
sovereign good that is God and having always your mind lifted
up in contemplation of heavenly things. So that all your soul
with the powers and strengths thereof gathered together into God
be made one spirit with him in whom stands sovereign
perfection of our way and living in this world. This short
doctrine for form and manner of living is given to you in
which stands the sovereignty of all perfection. And in which
if you will busily study and truly fulfil it, in effect you
will be blessed and in this manner begin here in this frail body
everlasting felicity. This is the healthful way that Arsenius,
taught by the Angel, kept himself and bade his disciples
keep. That is to say, 'Flee, Keep Silence, and Be in Rest'. 'These', he
said, 'Are the principles of spiritual health'. God be Thanked.
 

 


P. Odo Lang O.S.B., Librarian, Einsiedeln Abbey, which owns major Suso manuscript, Cod. 710 (322), also major Mechtild von Magdebourg manuscript

Foto: Frau Liliane Géraud, Zürich
 

Jan van Ruusbroec  (