The Flowing Light of the Godhead Read online

  19. Good Intentions That One Cannot Turn into Deeds

  20. This Book Came About out of a Threefold Favor; Love Flows, It Is Rich and Full of Desire, It Becomes Sick; Who Possesses Heaven; God Bestows Suffering and Consolation as Well

  21. How Bad Priests Shall Be Humiliated; [How Preachers Alone Should Preach and Be Bishops;] Concerning the Last Brothers

  22. Seven Things, Five of Which One Finds in Heaven and Two on Earth

  23. How God Speaks with the Soul in Three Places

  24. How Christ Reveals His Wounds in Days of Suffering. Four Things Knock on Heaven's Gate

  25. Concerning Burned Love

  26. Thinking About Death and Living Long Are Good

  27. How You Should Thank and Ask

  28. When You Are to Die, Take Leave of Ten Things

  29. Ten Parts of Divine Fire out of God's Nobility

  30. Pure Love Has Four Things

  31. How God Made the Soul. Concerning Pleasure and Pain. How God Is Like a Sphere

  32. How We Become Like God, St. Mary, the Angels, and the Saints

  33. Concerning a Strict Chapter to Which a Pilgrim Came Who Turned Out to Be a Great Lord

  34. Someone Who Despises the World Should Be Honored with Nine Things

  35. How the Soul of One Blessed Speaks to Her Body on the Last Day

  36. ThatJohn the Baptist Sang Mass for the Poor Girl Was Spiritual Knowledge in the Soul

  37. You Should Praise God, Lament, and Ask for Twelve Things

  38. No One Can Destroy God's Heaven. Hell Drives God Out

  39. The Reflection of God's Radiance by Our Lady and Her Power

  40. Temptation, the World, and a Good End Test Us

  41. How God's Splendor Is Reflected in a Human Being and in the Angels

  Sister Mechthild Wrote the Following in a Note to Her Brother B., of the Order of Preachers, Saying:

  43. This Writing Flowed out of God

  BOOK VII

  1. The Crown and the Dignity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Which He Shall Receive After the Last Day

  2. How a Person Prayed for All the Souls on All Souls' Day

  3. How Beneficial It Is for a Person to Examine His Heart Constantly with Humble Fear

  4. Our Lord's Switch

  5. Why the Convent Was Once Undergoing Trials

  6. The Chapter Room and How a Person Should Examine His Infractions and Weep for Them; Two Golden Pennies and Good Will and Desire

  7. How a Person May Always Be United with God

  8. How a Person Seeks God

  9. How the Loving Soul Praises Our Lord with All Creatures

  10. This Happened at a Time When There Was Great Turmoil

  11. How Our Lord Was Seen Looking Like a Worker

  12. How a Person Should Resist Vain Honor and Temptation

  13. How Our Lord Was Seen Looking Like a Pilgrim

  14. God's Choosing and Blessing

  15. How a Person Who Loves Truth Should Pray

  16. How a Person Spoke and Prayed

  17. How Knowledge Speaks to the Conscience

  18. Suggestions for the Seven Hours for Honoring the Passion of Our Lord

  19. The Greeting of Our Lady

  20. How One Should Pray the Ave Maria to Our Lady

  21. How One Should Examine One's Heart Before Going to God's Table

  22. Praise of the Heavenly Father

  23. How One Should Thank the Son

  24. The Flood of Love

  25. The Greeting for the Holy Trinity

  26. How One Should Entreat God in Temptation

  27. How a Religious Person Should Turn His Heart Away from the World

  28. The Misfortunes of War

  29. A Teaching

  30. A Prayer When Virgins Receive Their Crown

  31. A Lament

  32. How the Works of a Good Person Shine Forth in Relation to the Works of Our Lord

  33. A Spiritual Potion

  34. Spiritual Food

  35. The Seven Psalms

  36. A Spiritual Convent

  37. The Eternal Feast of the Holy Trinity

  38. How a Person in Religious Life Should Daily Lament and Confess His Sins to God

  39. How the Devil Rages and Chases About, Bites, and Gnaws When a Loving Soul That Burns with Divine Love Departs This World

  40. Thus Does the Loving Soul Speak to Her Dear Lord

  41. How a Dominican Father Was Seen

  42. The Drink of Honey

  43. Of Simple Love, How Wisdom Is Seen

  44. Five Sins and Five Virtues

  45. Seven Things, Five of Which One Finds in Heaven and Two on Earth

  46. How the Soul Presents Herself in Spiritual Poverty

  47. One Sin That Is Evil Beyond All Sins

  48. How Love Was Seen with Her Maidens

  49. Concerning a Lay Brother

  50. The Visible Favor of God

  51. A Prayer Against Sins of Omission

  52. How the Loving Soul Bows Beneath the Hand of God

  53. The Prison of Religious People

  54. Four Qualities of Faith

  55. How a Friend Writes to a Friend

  56. How God Touches His Friends with Suffering

  57. A Bit About Paradise

  58. St. Gabriel

  59. How the Message Came Before God

  60. How the Child Was Seen

  61. How One Should Prepare Oneself for God

  62. How the Maidens Serve Their Lady the Queen

  63. God's Will Is a Sovereign Lord in All Being

  64. How God Serves Man

  65. How God Adorns the Soul with Suffering

  Notes to Text

  Selected Bibliography

  Index to Introduction and Text

  Translator of This Volume

  FRANK TOBIN is professor of German at the University of Nevada, Reno, and serves on the editorial boards of Studia Mystica and Mystics Quarterly. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Dr. Tobin received a licentiate in philosophy from Berchmanskolleg in Munich in 1960, an M.A. in German from Marquette University in 1964 and a Ph.D. in German from Stanford in 1967. In addition to numerous articles and papers on medieval German thought and literature, his major publications include Mechthild von Magdeburg: A Medieval Mystic in Modern Eyes (Camden House, 1994) and Meister Eckhart: Thought and Language (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986). Previous contributions to The Classics of Western Spirituality series include his collaboration on Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher and his translation of Henry Suso.

  Author of the Preface

  MARGOT SCHMIDT is director of the Research Center of Medieval Spirituality, Asceticism and Mystics at the Catholic University of Eichstatt in Germany. Since 1985, she has served as editor of the collection of medieval texts and studies entitled Mystik in Geschichte and Gegenwart: Texte and Untersuchungen. In that series, she produced the first two volumes: she edited and translated the work of Rudolf of Biberach, De VII itinera aeternitatis, into German; the other is a volume of papers read at the Conference Theologia Mystica at Weingarten in November 1986. As of January 1998, the series contains fifteen volumes. She has written extensively on women mystics, especially Mechthild of Magdeburg, Hildegard of Bingen, Mechthild of Hackeborn and Margaret Ebner.

  Joseph P Fisher, S.J.

  and

  Bob Reardon

  in memoriam

  n completing this translation of Mechthild of Magdeburg's Flowing Light of the Godhead, I have incurred a debt of gratitude to many. First, I would like to thank the publishers Max Niemeyer Verlag for their kind permission to use as the basis of my translation their excellent recent critical text and notes, the lifelong work of the Germanist Hans Neumann. Also, my debt to Margot Schmidt is manifold. The profound knowledge she has transmitted in her scholarship has affected my understanding of Mechthild in ways both palpable and impalpable. More particularly, she generously sent me her excellent translation into modern German of The Flowing Light of the Godhead and the accompa
nying notes even before publication. The opportunity to compare her renderings with mine saved me from many a misstep. Finally, I wish to thank her for contributing the preface to this volume. My thanks are also due to GertrudJaron Lewis for her support and encouragement, to Bernard McGinn for his thoughtful suggestions, and to Patricia Beckman for her willingness to engage in a lively E-mail dialogue that resulted in several improvements. Lastly, as in the case of several of my previous academic endeavors, Bob Reardon's meticulous scrutiny of the entire manuscript has been invaluable. I can only wish that the finished product does some justice to the help I have receivedand to Mechthild.

  t is with great pleasure that I respond to Frank Tobin's request that I provide a preface for his fine English translation. In his introduction to the text he offers an initial orientation to this rich but difficult book and addresses important themes. To complement his remarks on Mechthild's book as an expression of mysticism, I would like to examine a theme-certainly of central importancenot touched upon there: the human and divine heart.

  Mechthild's book is a phenomenon that should not be viewed in isolation-as one mystical document among all the documents of mysticism. Rather, it is the expression of a basic human drive that comes to the surface, sometimes more, sometimes less. To these basic human drives we can reckon hunger, love, sex, and a yearning for God. This last-mentioned drive appears to have been so smothered by the others that today we scarcely still perceive it as a basic drive. And yet, the testimony of the mystics teaches us that the human person in its capacity for God (capax Dei) soars above all other recognized drives and surpasses them in a marvelous and terrifying way, once we have been awakened by the spark of God's spirit or God's love. In the face of this bursting forth of a passion for God, everything else suddenly retreats. An important characteristic of this passion for God is that it irrevocably prevents us from falling back into an all too vapid and tame existence. The passion for God powerfully pushes aside all merely worldly concerns in order to appropriate our entire vitality and our life, in all its aspects, for itself. What thereby occurs is that we become separated and detached from all that is familiar, so that we might give ourself over with total commitment to the demands of what is eternal.

  Out of this interplay of personal experience of God, and an interior command to proclaim and teach, arose the driving forces and goals of mystical literature which took form in confessional, didactic, and admonitory writings. These texts, which articulated the most intimate relationships between God and the human person, or inspired elucidations of salvation history, were fashioned by a consciousness of self that is unique. What Mechthild has preserved in writing The Flowing Light of the Godhead eloquently bears witness to this passion for God.

  In essence Mechthild of Magdeburg's book, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, is nothing other than the moving story of God's heart and the human heart, and of Lucifer's cunning attempts to interfere with the ties that join them. Understandably these levels, completely unequal in their power, unleash a highly dramatic life or death struggle. Reeling between exhilarating raptures and collisions with unyielding earthly reality, Mechthild is wrenched this way and that between her incomprehensible experiences of God on the one hand and, on the other, the uncertainty and terror of entering into a state of defenselessness and peril because of her writing. In this state of uncertainty she receives support from her confessor. Through him she received the legitimacy of her mission "to write this book out of God's heart and mouth" (IV 2). In another passage, in response to the astonishment of some people at her unusual disclosures, she claims legitimation from God: "If seven years ago, God had not offered support to my heart with special favor, I would still be silent and would never have written this" (111 1). Similarly, the close of Book Six, probably the work of an editor, formulates it thus: "The writing in this book flowed out of the living Godhead into Sister Mechthild's heart and has been as faithfully set down here as it was given by God out of her heart" (VI 43).

  Her mystical understanding under the spell of immediate experiences takes on the intermediary function of supporting the human person and strengthening the church. Regarding her mission of proclamation she perceives the words of Christ: "Truly, I say to you, in this book my heart's blood is written" (V 34). This way of speaking alludes to her own existential giving of herself in her writing to the last drop of blood.

  The heart is the principle and center of one's life as a person. It is also the place "where the human being in its own source borders on the mystery of God."' According to Karl Rahner heart is a primal word in the sense that it does not derive from some other word. It does not denote the physiological heart muscle as such but rather the original center of the physical-spiritual person before any differentiation into body and soul. This center of the person is in its essence open to other persons and to God. These meanings should be noted when Mechthild speaks of the human heart, but also when she speaks of the heart of God and Lucifer's heart.

  1. The Heart of God

  Experiencing God becomes in the case of Mechthild a vital mutual interaction between the heart of God and the human heart in which, surprisingly, longing lies in God's heart:

  What is new in Mechthild is that the old motif of Christ as Physician is not limited to its traditional meaning of redemption and salvation of the soul, but rather becomes an expression of the unio mystica, in which the lovesick soul receives her fulfillment through Christ, the Physician (as in VII 58). And in the passage quoted just above we see the motif completely reversed. The Lord is lovesick for the soul and she, with complete emotional commitment, wants to be his physician! Eros forces not only the soul under its yoke, but God himself, because he created man out of love and had his Son become man to redeem him. From this Mechthild draws the conclusion: "This same nature forces God to greet us...with holy intimacy" (IV 14). This statement finds its place in the tradition of those who speak of God's indwelling in the heart,' of his nearness in speaking to us, of elevation to the point of ecstasy, and declare categorically that God by his grace can do this at any time. This intimacy with God is only a foretaste of the everlasting union of God and humanity which Mechthild vividly portrays as a personal happening:

  So intense at times is the assimilation of the human heart to the divine heart, as it leaves all earthly things behind, that the soul proclaims: "Lord, because I have no earthly treasure, I do not have an earthly heart either. For you, Lord, are my treasure, just as you are also my heart; and you alone are my good" (IV 7).

  In spite of the sublimity of the union of God and humanity in the assimilation of heart by heart, the overwhelming power of God encounters only weakness in the human heart: "Whoever were to give himself over to the ecstasy that comes from God... would enter into such great delight and such holy knowledge that no heart would be able to bear it" (V 29).

  Advanced in age, Mechthild, looking back in Book Six, reflects on the attraction and tension existing between human and divine hearts in order to clarify that, though the first step is always God attracting and the divine heart enticing, there can be no progress without a reaction of the human heart. Mechthild portrays as a love game how the divine heart goes about wooing.

  When God sees fit to let his divine heart shine forth in love toward the very blessed soul so intensely that a small spark alights on the cold soul and she receives so much that the heart of this person begins to glow, his soul to melt, and his eyes to flow, then our Lord would like to make an earthly person so heavenly that one actually wants to follow, love, and see God in him. And the person's senses say: "No, I can be of much use in external matters." And it is especially cloistered people who say this when they are being especially clever. (VI 13)

  Mechthild is here criticizing the neglect of interior religious training, which begins with the perceptivity and formation of the heart. In an allegory about the divine fire that is supposed to express something about the greatness and power of God to act, she suddenly breaks off and stammers:

  The centr
al focal point is always the heart which conquers and binds together what is divine and what is human. Indeed, on the basis of her experience of God she lays claim to kinship with God. She herself originates spiritually from the heart of the Father, corporeally from the heart of the Son, and has been purified by the Spirit of both. Thus elevated through divine grace Mechthild considers herself to be vitally subsumed into the life of the Trinity and she calls out to the Trinity:

  It is as if the pulse of the three divine Persons, expanding mysteriously from heart to heart, was beating in her.

  Theologically speaking, this image of physical oneness links characteristics specific to each Person of the Trinity with the fact that the human person to its very core is directed essentially to God. The creative energy of the human heart reacts to the unfathomable power of the Father Creator. The incarnation of the Son becomes the formative, molding power of earthly life, even of the body itself. From the power of the Holy Spirit as the Giver of Life the whole human person breathes and itself acts as inspired. Among the many and often difficult images for the Trinity in Mechthild's writings this one, in its compactness and profundity with respect to our close kinship with God, is the one that expresses most powerfully the evidence for the Trinity in the human person and for its transference into the human person. A life based on this excludes in its very nature a feeling of emptiness and homelessness. On the contrary, it makes the human heart secure. For God has placed it "in his glowing heart," where he, eternally craving for love, "neither increases nor decreases," but remains "as he always was" (14). This is yet another confirmation that eros lies within God himself.

  2. The Goal of the Human Heart

  Mechthild's basic assertion about the human heart is its insatiable longing for God. It comes to the fore as the infinite relationship reveals itself. Humans as finite beings reach out toward the infinite being of God. And the goal, for Mechthild, is attained in a vital infinite relationship of heights and depths which is stirred by intense emotions. It is only to pure longing that God reveals himself and says: