Self‐Transcendence and the Group: The Attitude to Life of Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century Beguines
Fiona Bowie
New Blackfriars December 1, 1992 DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-2005.1992.tb07279.x (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
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| Key points | The author argues that Mechthild of Magdeburg's paradoxical imagery of loving what is not and fleeing what is serves as a paradigm for how medieval religious women, particularly beguines, pursued self-transcendence and communality. Mechthild's concept of the 'true wilderness' represents a state beyond ordinary existence, reached by abandoning earthly attachments to unite with a God experienced as both absent and present. Despite her communal monastic life, Mechthild held that each individual must ultimately journey to God alone. |
Abstract
You should love what is notAnd flee what is.You should stand aloneAnd approach no one.You should strive alwaysTo be free from all things.You should free the boundAnd bind the free.You should comfort the sickAnd yet possess nothing.You should drink the water of sufferingAnd feed the fire of love with the fuel of virtue.Then you shall live in the true wilderness.Mechthild of Magdeburg: The Flowing Light of the Godhead. (35 1)This highly poetic, but deeply paradoxical passage from Mechthild of Magdeburg, the thirteenth century beguine and mystic, can stand as a paradigm for the themes of self-transcendence and communality as understood and experienced by religious women in the later middle ages, and in particular those belonging to the beguine movement.Mechthild advises her readers how to live in ‘the true wilderness’, a place located beyond our ordinary existence and geographical reality. This ‘true wilderness’ is reached by ‘loving what is not’ and ‘flee(ing) what is’. All that binds her to this world must be left behind, if the mystic is to rise above earthly ties and unite herself with God, her transcendent lover; a God who, like the Lady of the Courtly Lover, is a God of absence as well as presence, of pain as well as joy. Although Mechthild chose a communal form of spiritual life as a member of a monastic community, she realised that each of us must travel to God alone.