St Gertrude was reluctant to acquiesce to the Lord's demand that she
write an account of her mystical experiences for others to read.
"I thought it so unseemly," she confesses, "to write down all these things
that I could not bring myself to listen to the voice of conscience and
kept on putting it off."1 Yet , fortunately,
her Legatus memorialis abundantiae divinae pietatis (The Herald of Divine
Love in its usual English rendering) was written despite her reservations,
and has survived. How did Gertrude manage to overcome her qualms?
This paper proposes to explore the way in which deployment of one central
symbol, that of the sacred heart of Christ, invests Gertrude with both
the authority and the ability to write in seemly fashion about God.
Gertrude was born in 1256 to unknown parents near modern Eisleben
in eastern Germany. At the age of five she was given as a child oblate
to the convent of Helfta, a thriving intellectual community which also
included, as Gertrude grew up, the well-known mystics Mechthild of Magdeburg
and Mechthild of Hackeborn. Gertrude was from childhood one of the
community's most scholarly members, a prodigy in Latin rhetoric, more an
intellectual than a mystic until she underwent a profound conversion experience
at the age of twenty-five. After that, though she continued to write
prolifically (prayers, spiritual exercises, scriptural exegesis), she began
to receive regular holy visions which, being such private dealings with
God, she did not at first write down. When she finally made up her
mind to do so, eight years later, she produced what is now Book 2 of the
Legatus. (Books 1 and 3-5 were apparently compiled by other nuns
at Helfta, probably largely at Gertrude's instigation or dictation.)
Book 2, on which I will focus for the purposes of this essay, is notable
within the history of Christian devotion because its vivid descriptions
of Gertrude's visions show a considerable elaboration on the long-standing
but ill-defined veneration of Christ's heart. This veneration was
present somewhat in early Christianity, in the belief that Christ's heart
poured forth a redemptive fountain through the wound in His side; that
image was sustained by Anselm in the eleventh century and became more pronounced
and widespread in the twelfth, culminating in its most famous articulation
by St Bernard in his commentary on the Song of Songs.2
But it is the women of Helfta—Gertrude foremost, who surely knew Bernard's
commentary, and to a somewhat lesser extent the two Mechthilds—who make
this devotion central to their mystical visions. Caroline Walker
Bynum calls theirs "an explicitly eucharistic devotion,"3
in which the heart, which is, obviously, of Christ's body and blood, both
physical humanity and dispenser of the Spirit, becomes the meeting place
between human and divine. Gertrude prays for such complete communion
through Christ's heart in the seventh chapter of the Exercitia (Gertrude's
only other surviving work, a series of prayers and exercises in pursuing
the Christian life): "O heart that runs over with loving-kindness!
. . . O heart full of compassion! . . . O dearest heart, I
pray from my heart, absorb my heart totally in you."4
She often visualizes Christ's heart as pouring forth a stream of pure
crystal water (cf. Apoc. 22.1) which unites her to Him: "you will
never be far from me, as is shown you in this stream" (Legatus 2.9).
Yet to experience mystical union with and through the heart of
Christ is something entirely different than to express it in words.
I have already noted Gertrude's hesitation in making the radical translation.
Students of women's mysticism in the Middle Ages will appreciate the two
most obvious obstacles to a literary endeavor of this sort. For one
thing, the ever-present Pseudo-Dionysian problem endures, the sheer unthinkability
of rendering divine things in our impossibly makeshift human languages.5
For another, Gertrude (many would sympathetically lament) had the misfortune
of being born a woman in a period when women were rarely taken seriously
as scholars or theologians, when women's authority as writers was automatically
considered suspect. After all, many women writing at the time found
it necessary to include self-effacing apologies for their sex: Helfta's
Mechthild of Magdeburg finds her authority lacking in comparison to a "learned
religious man," asking God "How can one believe that you built a golden
house in a filthy slough?"6 and even the eminently
learned Hildegard von Bingen calls herself a "paupercula" and "indocta
mulier."7 However, any assertion that Gertrude's own reluctance stemmed
in part from her sex must remain conjectural; at no juncture does Gertrude
herself retreat rhetorically into being "only a little woman." While
her humility and sense of unworthiness are indeed manifest, they are not
explicitly gender-linked.8
What is more central to Gertrude's anxiety is the first problem,
the fundamental human problem of communicating the divine: "I began
to consider within myself how difficult, not to say impossible, it would
be for me to find the right expressions and words for all the things that
were said to me, so as to make them intelligible on a human level, without
danger of scandal" (Legatus 2.10). As Emilie Zum Brunn and Georgette
Epiney-Burgard argue in the introduction to their anthology Women Mystics
in Medieval Europe, although negative theology tends today to be thought
of as a purely intellectual and not an affective pursuit (having "deteriorated
into scholastic metaphysics"), affective mysticism such as that of Marguerite
Porete, Meister Eckhart, and Hadewijch of Brabant does demonstrate considerable
concern with problems of language and representation.9
One has only to glance at Marguerite for ample evidence, a writer whose
Soul asserts that "everything one can say or write about God, or think
about Him, God who is greater than what is ever said, is thus more like
lying than speaking the truth."10 Likewise,
Hadewijch strongly links even her erotic and apparently bodily piety to
unspeakability: "my mind was beset so fearfully and so painfully
by desirous love that all my separate limbs threatened to break, and all
my separate veins were in travail. The longing in which I then was
cannot be expressed by any language or any person I know."11
Gertrude herself confesses of her spiritual experiences:
[E]ven if my tongue were to stammer out something from [the paradise
of union], I who have been admitted, favored by divine goodness, if only
by way of my own vices and negligences, as though all covered with a thick
crust, I should never really be able to grasp any of it. Although
the knowledge of angels and human beings were to be worthily combined,
even that would not suffice to form one single word that might accurately
express even a shadow of such sovereign excellence. (Legatus 2.8)
It is important, therefore, to remember that, in the context
of fundamental divine unspeakability, the popular feminist problem of "writing
the body" becomes first and foremost the much thornier issue of writing
God's body, via experiences of Christ, and only secondarily the problem
of writing the mystic's own body; the writer's body, through imitatio Christi,
becomes yet another text in which to try to read Christ.12
Gertrude's essential challenge, in first hesitating and then attempting
to claim her authority by writing, is not so much to validate her own personal
bodily experience as to validate the capacity of her bodily language to
transmit ineffable truths about the nature and power of God. Furthermore,
her choices of imagery render that capacity manifestly in need of validation.
Gertrude, and her readers likewise, cannot but be aware that, by forefronting
Christ's heart in her devotions, she has made a most audacious synecdoche:
the representation of the Divine by a body part.
That the heart is, in one sense, a merely physical organ is recognized
by Gertrude when she tells God that "you have led me to know and consider
the interior of my heart which until then I had heeded as little, if I
may put it thus, as the interior of my feet" (Legatus 2.2). The conscious
absurdity of her comparison suggests both that for the heedless human the
heart is a common body part like any other, and that, when illumined by
God, it can potentially be more than this. But the heart, disturbingly
juxtaposed here with the lowly feet, becomes specifically troubling, potentially
"unseemly," when used as a figure for divinity. If God cannot be
grasped in words, how can the very concrete heart, of all things, be defended
as a metaphor? And how does Gertrude, who cannot escape from the
concreteness of the human world, the human body, human language, dare to
write at all?
The answers, I believe, lie in Christ's heart itself, as represented
by Gertrude. Perhaps paradoxically, the figure of the sacred heart
validates its own self as both source and result of truthful words.
One must bear in mind, still, that the Heart is, according to Gertrude
and others, where the divine and human join; this is where Christ's physical
humanity is also the fountain of divine spirit; this is where the human
heart and soul go to commune with both divine body and spirit. Hence
it seems that, provided translation between the divine and human realms
were possible, the eucharistic Heart/heart would be the appropriate site
for its occurrence. Gertrude's writings show that the heart can house
the unspeakable and speak the inarticulable. She at one point describes
God as "all truth, clearer than all light, yet hidden deeper in our heart
than any secret" (Legatus 2.1), and she praises the heart's eloquence over
that of the tongue:
Since my tongue is ineffective to express how, in this showing, you
granted me still more abundantly the abiding gift of your grace, may the
affection of my heart do so, and . . . may I learn to direct my gratitude
effectively through the affective movement of my heart toward your love.
(Legatus 2.12)
Yet the heart is not only the communicator of wordless emotion, but
also seems to be the place, at times, where emotions are turned into words.
The sentences of introduction to Gertrude's first-person confessions state
that "she wrote the things which she had experienced in her heart in intimate
converse with the Beloved, in her own hand and in his praise, in the following
words" (Legatus 2.1). Book 2 of the Legatus is thus initially introduced
to us as a verbalization of a heart-felt experience. Gertrude describes
this process in more detail later, after she has recounted her resistances
to God's insistence that she record her visions. God's answer to
her objections about the impossibility of adequate representation is the
following: "I am going to hold you close to my divine heart, so that
by repeated inspiration my influence may act gradually upon you, pleasantly
and sweetly, just as much as you can bear" (Legatus 2.10).13
Gertrude's written visions as we have them, including the visions of the
sacred heart, are here represented as absorbed from the influence of that
very divine heart, "just as much as [she] could bear," that is, translated
into terms manageable to the human mind, not by Gertrude's own agency,
but by God's—that is, by that of his physical manifestation, the Heart.
Thus the sacred heart as it is written by Gertrude is already its translation
of itself; but at least we may trust the translation as having been produced
by the original author, so to speak, and the writing is made more "seemly"
by virtue of its divine authority.
The Heart's responsibility for Gertrude's writing is further
consolidated by the suggestion that Christ's heart has written and is written
directly on her own heart and soul. This imprinting is accomplished
in two ways. First of all, Gertrude uses the conventional scriptural
figure of the wax seal to express the reformation of her soul by contact
with God: "I saw my soul, like wax melting in the heat of the fire
(Ps. 21:14), being placed close to the Lord's most sacred breast, as though
to take the imprint of a seal (Song 8:6; Wisd. 9:10). . . . Thus
it was sealed with the imprint of the resplendent and ever tranquil Trinity"
(Legatus 2.7). Secondly, Gertrude sees her own heart as having been
spiritually inscribed with Christ's five wounds (the most significant of
which, of course, is the wound in the side—the heart). She finds
a prayer in an unidentified book which reads, in part:
"Inscribe with your precious blood, most merciful Lord, your wounds
on my heart, that I may read in them both your sufferings and your love.
May the memory of your wounds ever remain in the hidden places of my heart,
to stir up within me your compassionate sorrow, so that the flame of your
love may be enkindled in me. Grant also that all creatures may become
vile to me, and that you may become the only sweetness of my heart."
(Legatus 2.4)
And swiftly her prayer is answered: "I knew in my spirit that
I had received the stigmata of your adorable and venerable wounds interiorly
in my heart, just as though they had been made on the natural places of
the body" (Legatus 2.4). Hence Gertrude has been marked (twice) by
signs of God; she has the truest writing in her, which, "read," conveys
Christ's sufferings and love.14 Paradoxically,
the physical symbol and the writing, both ordinarily human rather than
divine constructions, lead in this unusual case to her renunciation of
creatures, to the transcendence of the physical, and are worthy of being
her "only sweetness." Clearly the writing by and on the heart contains
a different potential for spiritual validity than other writing.
Not only is the sacred heart responsible for generating true
"writing" internally, but it also becomes the vehicle through which God
communicates his authorization of the use of tangible signs generally.
This is best illustrated in Gertrude's long narration of the Lord's response
to her complaint that she had received no tangible confirmation, such as
a handshake, of the "pact" made between herself and God: