Scholar Wendy Farley introduces the Rhineland mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg:
Little is known about Mechthild [c. 1212–c.1282], though her name indicates that she lived most of her life in Magdeburg, near the border between German-speaking and Slavic territory…. A pious child, she was twelve when her almost daily “greetings” by the Holy Spirit began. As a young woman of about twenty she moved to Magdeburg, a city where she knew only one person, perhaps a Dominican friar. She lived as a beguine for most of the rest of her life…. Mechthild’s beautiful and bold book The Flowing Light of the Godhead is among the first religious writings in Middle Low German. By writing in her native language, she makes her spiritual journey and her theological reflections available to women and laypeople. [1]
Farley focuses on Mechthild’s radical understanding of God’s power:
The church of Mechthild’s time used monarchical images for God to justify a hierarchical ordering of human society: from God descended popes, bishops, clergy, lords, vassals, and fathers. Like medieval rulers, God demands obedience and loyalty. God’s favor is to be desired and God’s punishments feared.
Mechthild uses royal imagery for God (empress, queen, or lord). But because she conceives of power as a form of love, she understands monarchical metaphors in a distinctive way. God’s majesty and omnipotence are qualities related to the divine desire for intimacy with humanity. For Mechthild, it is not sheer power that makes God divine. It is love. This play between love and power is evident in the preface of Mechthild’s book, where God claims authorship of the book. “I made [gemachet] it in my powerlessness [unmaht], for I cannot restrain myself as to my gifts.” [2] This is a paradoxical way of describing divine power. Even God is powerless to contain God…. God is powerless to stop giving gifts to humanity. Because the divine nature is love, to do so would require the unmaking of divinity itself.
Theologians such as Augustine and [Martin] Luther struggle to understand how to reconcile love and justice or divine omnipotence and human agency. This is in part because they think of power as coercive or univocal agency. But for Mechthild, God’s desire for humanity is incompatible with sheer omnipotence, not because God has less power but because it is a different kind of power. God renounces power as “might,” in favor of love….
Mechthild acknowledges that there is a kind of power that demands strict justice and leaves the guilty to languish in their prison…. But she withholds this kind of power from God. This is not because God has less power than these wielders of might but because that kind of power is a diseased and distorted power. Out of love, the Father abandons the power to perpetuate suffering because the deeper and more authentic power is what redeems, heals, and restores. Mercy is a different kind of almighty-ness which draws even those brutalized by sin back into loving communion.… Divine power allows love to displace might. [3]
References:
[1] Wendy Farley, The Thirst of God: Contemplating God’s Love with Three Women Mystics (Westminster Knox Press, 2015), 27, 28.
[2] Mechthild, prologue to The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. Frank Tobin (Paulist Press, 1998), 39.
[3] Farley, Thirst of God, 60, 61–62.
Image credit and inspiration: Augustin Fernandez, Untitled (detail), 2020, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. With the Rhineland mystics, we share the ability to gaze with love at the plants of the earth, appreciating the food we eat, and across time and place, we are invited to step through the doorway into the Great Mystery.
Story from Our Community:
After my husband, Doug, had a stroke, he became less able physically, and his speech was limited. He began to spend hours sitting in silent prayer and had a sense of peace and contentment. Doug had spent his life working with people who had been pushed to the margins of society. As a physician, he never turned anyone away and insisted that they call him “Doug,” not doctor. His funeral was attended by hundreds of people of many backgrounds, religions, and cultures whose lives he had impacted. If being a mystic means living from the piece of God that dwells within us, then Doug was a true example.
—Ann F.
