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by Benedicta Ward
First published as Ch. 7 in
After Eve,
edited by Janet Martin Soskice.
Collins Marshall
Pickering, 1990
Reproduced on our website with the necessary
permissions
How could I presume to teach or advise you who are
favoured with hidden knowledge and in whom the influence of Christ's anointing
still lives so that you have no need of teaching, for you are said to be able
to search the secrets of heaven and to discern by the light of the Holy Spirit
things that are beyond the knowledge of man. It is rather for me to beg that
you may not forget me before God or those who are united to me in spiritual
fellowship.(1)
That is a remarkably humble letter from the greatest
theologian of the twelfth century, Bernard of Clairvaux. It is his reply to a
letter he had received from the Abbess of Mount St Rupert, Hildegard, who
describes herself as 'paupercula femina forma ['a poor little womanly
figure']. Bernard, the theologian of prayer, is filled with admiration for one
who prays but does not analyse; there are two spheres, separate and distinct,
and it is the woman who prays who is admired by the man who analyses and not
vice versa. Four hundred years later in the relationship between John of the
Cross and Teresa of Avila there has been a change in which both mystics also
apply their minds to the analysis of experience. The change is in the women
visionaries rather than in the men theologians and it seems worth comparing
Hildegard of Bingen and Teresa of Avila in some detail in order to see where
the differences lie. Much of the contrast they present may be attributed to
differences of literary genre, of culture or simply of temperament but it may
be of deeper significance to explore the exalted position of women in the
medieval Church as true 'theologians', that is, as seers and sybils,
visionaries and intercessors, and to see why they were so respected and if this
position was changed then they turned their minds also to the analysis of the
life of prayer. With Hildegard and Teresa who wrote so much and in such variety
it is only possible to indicate here where some of the differences lie and to
offer a tentative suggestion about the reasons behind them.
Bernard of Clairvaux wrote about the journey of the soul
to God with such insight that he influenced deeply and permanently the way in
which prayer was both experienced and discussed in his own day as well as
later. It is at first sight remarkable that he should have been so impressed by
the prophetic and mystical experiences of a woman, but he makes it clear that
Hildegard was everything he admired and, he thought, failed himself to become.
Above all she was taught by God, the clear structures of learning which Bernard
deplored had never closed her mind to divine truth; she saw by what she called
the divine light and she saw truly. Like the unlettered lay brothers at
Clairvaux, she heard and saw the world of the spirit directly. The parallel
Bernard saw between them was in part, of course, a fantasy; Hildegard
constantly claims to be 'simple' and 'unlearned' but this modest phrase is
deceptive. Unlike the lay brothers of the Cistercian Order, many of whom really
were unable to read and write, Hildegard knew Latin and dictated books of
considerable complexity. She was a woman of renown in her times, and her
writings comprise almost the greatest range of literature of any medieval
author. What Bernard meant and what Hildegard claimed, was, rather, a lack of
formal academic training. What they agreed upon in a positive sense was that
just because of this 'ignorance' she could receive direct inspiration from God
which could not be argued with. Moreover, it was an authority that even the
most rational minds of the twelfth century accepted as final: what Hildegard
wanted done, was done, not on account of her undoubted ability either as a
writer or as a monastic superior, but because she was held to enjoy a knowledge
far superior to any merely rational method of inquiry.
Hildegard was admired by many besides Bernard. He
recommended her to Eugenius, the Cistercian Pope, and arranged for him to meet
Hildegard at Trier on his way to Rheims for the trial of Gilbert de la Poree
since Bingen is on the Rhine only thirty miles from Trier. Eugenius became one
of Hildegard's fervent admirers and they wrote letters to one another; she
corresponded with successive popes, Anastasius IV, Adrian IV and Alexander III;
she wrote to churchmen, to religious, and also to secular rulers such as Conrad
III and his son Frederick Barbarossa, Henry II of England and his wife Eleanor
of Aquitaine, the Empress Irene and Philip, Count of Flanders. She undertook
journeys, preached to monks in their monasteries and clergy in their synods,
and laymen in towns; she gave spiritual counsel, she exorcised, she argued and
she prophesied. She was clearly a woman of very great force of character, but
all she did was in the name of the light which was not her own, a claim that
was recognised and accepted.
Hildegard was respected not in spite of her tendency to
strange and emotional ecstasies but because of them: they marked her out as a
prophetess. It seems that she was not suddenly visited by heavenly inspiration
as a nun and abbess but had been accustomed to such visions from early
childhood. In 1141 when she was forty-two she felt herself commissioned to
reveal the visions, which she did by dictating them to two close friends, the
monk Volmar and the nun Richarda:
A fiery light of the greatest brilliancy coming from
the opened heavens poured into all my brain and kindled in my heart and breast,
a flame that warms but does not consume as the sun heats everything over which
he casts his rays ... I said and wrote . . . not according to the curious
invention of my heart but as I saw, heard and perceived them in a heavenly way
through the secret mysteries of God. And again I heard a voice from heaven
saying unto me, 'Cry aloud therefore and write thus,'(2)
This description, couched in the personal and emotional
language of the twelfth century, is nevertheless replete with traditional
imagery. The 'prayer of fire' associated with the descent of the Holy Spirit is
a main theme of Eastern theology and the final quotation links her ecstasy with
the Book of Revelation and the vision of St John (cf. Rev. 1.19). Moreover, her
revelations belong to the tradition of compunction, that piercing of the heart
by fear and love for a further inner knowledge of the divine which Gregory the
Great articulated for the West and which formed the basis of such popular
meditations as those of Anselm of Canterbury.(3) At times it is the theme of
wonder and glory that seizes her:
I saw as it were the mystery of God in the southern
sky, a wonderful and beautiful image in the form of a man whose face was so
beautiful and brilliant that I could more easily have looked into the sun ...
'I am the high and the fiery power that kindled all living sparks ... I burn in
the fiery life of the substance of divinity above the beauty of the fields, and
I shine in the waters and I burn in the stars . . . '(4)
At other times, it is the terror of distance from God
and the burden of sinful mortality that oppresses her:
Whither am I, a pilgrim, going? Into the valley of
death. In what way do I go? The way of error. What consolation do I have? That
of a pilgrim. Others deride me, saying, 'Where is your honour now?' Oh, where
am I? Whence did I come? What consolation do I seek in this captivity? How can
I break my chains? What eye can see my wounds? What hands will anoint them with
oil? Who will show pity on my grief? Therefore He will hear my
cry.(5)
Such deeply emotional and self-revealing experiences by
no means removed Hildegard into a realm of mysterious ineptitude. What she
wrote about was not only or even especially religious. She was interested in
botany, in medicine, in minerals, she composed music and her visions inspired
pictures of a wild and impressive kind. Her advice was very practical, and her
administration of her abbey so effective that the small and rather
undistinguished little group which she met at Disiboden (when she arrived there
as a child of eight to be educated by the hermitess Jutta) had, when she died
as abbess in 1179 at the age of eighty-two, become a large and flourishing
abbey on excellent land at Bingen. This move was an example of the force of a
visionary woman upon very practical men. The monks closest to her convent as
confessors viewed her proposal to move from Disiboden with alarm and hostility.
They were unwilling to lose both nuns, who were without exception and by a
deliberate policy of the abbess, high-born ladies, and their endowments.
Hildegard wrote to the monks in these terms when she heard of their opposition
to the move:
In accordance with what I had seen in my true vision I
said to the father abbot, 'The serene light says, you shall be father to our
provost (the monk Volmar) and father of the salvation of the souls of the
daughters of my mystic garden. But their alms do not belong to you or to your
brothers - your cloister should be a refuge for these women and if you are
determined to go on with your perverse proposals, raging against us, you will
be like the Amalekites . . . justice will destroy you. And when I, poor little
creature, had with these words petitioned the abbot and his confreres for the
freehold of the site and domains of my daughters they all granted it to me,
entering the transfer in a codex.(6)
Hildegard was listened to and respected as a sybil, as a
prophet, one through whom the Spirit of God spoke most clearly but at the same
time her influence and practical activity were undoubted. In this she was a
highly significant figure for her times. There is no doubt that the twelfth
century saw a change in the kind of activities open to women. The political and
economic power they wielded with ease and confidence earlier was drastically
limited. They were excluded from Latin education by the rise of the
universities as never before. The disaster of the cult of courtly love isolated
them by glorifying them. But in certain spheres the women prospered. One was
the emergence of vernacular literature and another was the prophetic and
mystical role which opened increasingly to them.
From Hildegard of Bingen in the twelfth century to
Teresa of Avila in the sixteenth there was an increasing number of
prophetesses, many of them women of discernment and influence. The thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries in particular saw an explosion of women visionaries:
the great ladies of Helfta, Gertrude and Mechtild, and particularly their
younger contemporary Mechtild of Hackborn; Elizabeth of Schonau; Hadewijch,
Beatrice of Nazareth, Margeret of Oignt, Catherine of Sienna, Catherine of
Genoa, Bridget of Sweden, Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, to name only the
most obvious. Like Hildegard, these were women visionaries, highly respected
and attended to: dreams, visions, prophecies, trances, locutions, suspension of
the faculties, all were there. With the more able and controlled visionaries,
they committed their revelations to writings which exercised influence and
commanded respect. Of course, men were also equally open to the influence of
mystical experience but it seems that this mostly took the form of analysis of
the life of prayer in writing, exhortation to it in preaching, or counsel about
it. Many of the revelations of the women mystics were written about by men by
whom they were highly, even hysterically respected, as having a specially
direct and mysterious contact with divinity which was its own justification.
Though deeply immersed in the central activity of prayer with all its demands
for solitude, silence and detachment, the women visionaries were also active,
busy women, aware of the world and its needs, and prepared to involve
themselves and their experiences of prayer in the affairs of their day.
Catherine of Sienna, for instance, was at the centre of ecclesiastical politics
for most of her adult life yet was pre-eminently renowned for her visions and
ecstatic experiences. One can only conclude that unlike ourselves, the Middle
Ages regarded the exterior phenomena of the mystic as a passport to
credibility, not the reverse. This link between paranormal phenomena, sound
theology and practical common sense presents certain problems for those in a
very different psychological and theological atmosphere. There are perhaps at
least two preliminary differences in the understanding of reality to bear in
mind when approaching this question, which were true for the sixteenth as well
as the twelfth century.
The first major difference to notice is the extent to
which medieval theology was linked to ancient concepts of anthropology. The
human biology of the ancient world depended on the theory of the elements and
the humours. Man was the microcosm of the universe, and both were made up of
the elements of earth, air, fire and water. Man and woman together formed the
perfect human being and the elements were divided between them: men were
predominantly air and fire, women earth and water. Air and fire made for the
critical intellect, earth signified fruitfulness and water was a spiritual
principal which opened women to visions and dreams. The twelfth century pushed
many things to logical conclusions, it was a great age for categorising and
making lists and they did it with this world view also. Man issued from the
hand of God, male/female. The airy and fiery elements opened him to reason, the
earthy, watery elements to divinity unalloyed. Hildegard put it like this:
Oh humans, look at the human being! for it contains
heaven and earth and all other creatures within itself and is one form and all
other creatures hide in it.(7)
The part of this whole which was directly open to heaven
was, therefore, feminine; woman was man's love, his heart, and his direct route
to the powers of the air. She was therefore seen as being by her very nature
the dreamer, the prophet, the visionary.
Secondly, there was a different understanding throughout
the Middle Ages of the significance of the flesh. On the one hand, extreme
illness was not regarded as merely unfortunate; it could be a gift, opening the
mind to heaven: Hildegard, Teresa and many, perhaps all, other women mystics
began their inner, mystical life through this liberating breaking of the
external senses in severe illnesses. On the other hand, interior vision was
naturally accompanied by external phenomena: the visionaries saw, heard,
smelled, touched, even tasted the celestial visions, reacting visibly to inner
experience with their senses. These physical phenomena were recorded vividly
and with reverence, a fact which is often forgotten by those who concentrate on
the very strong and theologically sensible content of the visions. For the
Middle Ages, the reactions of the body were not seen as improper but as
authenticating. Where people were peculiarly open to God it was expected that
the effect would show in their bodies. This is not perhaps completely alien to
our experience. After all, human beings only have five senses to register
whatever happens to them; the spirit does not invent new and spiritual matter
for itself. Even now, it is a common experience that serious illness can become
the gateway to deeper apprehensions of reality. On the other hand, great
personal grief or complete desolation does not make one pale and romantic but
is so disorientating that it will be as likely as not to cause vomiting and a
blinding headache. So the coming of the Spirit of God on a human being was
thought to use the normal make-up of that person. Thus, the eyes closed, the
breathing changed, those so visited seemed to speak automatically, to rise from
the ground, become rigid and immovable or even impassible for hours on end;
they heard sounds inaudible and saw sights invisible to others -all these
things earlier ages took for granted and even required in their mystics.
Such physical reactions might alert people to the
presence of something unusual but in spite of this it would still seem to us
that such personal revelation was in itself uncheckable. If I say I have a
vision, you cannot say I have not. The problem of authentication of visionaries
has always exercised serious-minded people, but in earlier ages the external
symptoms had greater weight. There were women visionaries whose ecstasies seem
to us pointless, neither significant nor helpful to others. Perhaps Christina
the Astonishing falls into this category as someone we regard as simply
neurotic. She is said to have been frequently in trances so deep that they were
mistaken for death; on one occasion her body had been carried into church for
burial when she revived. At once, her corpse flew up to the roof where she
perched like a bird until the people were cleared out, for it was known that
Christina could not stand the smell of human flesh. Among her more pointless
escapades was her habit of getting into ovens where she sat down, presumably
under the impression that she was a bun. She would climb on to the mill wheel
and go round with it, and once she sat down in the font when it was full of
water.(8)This tomboy athletic style of sainthood seems to us unedifying since
totally devoid of theological or moral content but her contemporaries were
prepared to accept what they did not understand; there was sufficient respect
for her trances for her to be included in the calendar of the saints. The
reactions of the body were regarded as the work of the Spirit upon flesh and
that was sufficient for wonder and awe; they were signs of the hidden approval
of God, beyond human judgments and opinions.
While these two ideas about the human person and about
the significance of the flesh are unfamiliar to the twentieth century, they
continued long past the sixteenth century to shape European notions of reality.
It is not, therefore, that a change occurred in the sixteenth century. Rather,
a new caution began to be felt about the significance of bodily phenomena in
prayer. There was a new stress on what was intellectually orthodox, accompanied
by more caution about the possibility of demonic deception especially for the
untutored mind. In a united Europe, where Christian teaching was mostly clearly
articulated and heretics were few, visionaries had been easily accepted and
indeed cherished, their orthodoxy unquestioned. In the sixteenth century under
the pressure of heresy, the evidence of the experiences of the ecstatic
visionaries was received with a new caution. Those faced with a visionary who
might well be a heretic and perhaps, like Elizabeth Barton, the Fair Maid of
Kent, used in secular political matters, could no longer be impressed solely by
her states of trance; they might suspect quite other spirits of speaking
through her. A vision itself was no longer authenticating. Visionaries had to
be examined for uprightness of life and their visions had to be checked by
their content; was what they said in ecstasy worth saying? Was it in accordance
with Scripture? With church doctrine as agreed by the consensus of Christian
people? Did it lead to the virtues of charity, faith, hope, peace? Was it
edifying to others?
Such analysis did increasingly take place and one of the
foremost in offering such criteria for authenticity was a woman who was herself
subject to extreme and alarming mystical states. Teresa of Avila was within
this tradition of women visionaries. Like them, she was a woman of great
influence and continual activity; like her predecessors, she claimed ignorance
of both Latin and scholastic methods, the traditional deprecatio which
nevertheless was intended to show that the writer's mind was not confined along
particular and defined ways. She writes, she says, about what she understands
from within, not from exterior information. Like most of the women mystics
after Hiidegard, Teresa wrote in the vernacular. Subject to trances, visions,
ecstasies, she, like the rest, was widely consulted and was most highly
regarded for her prayer; so highly regarded that people would act upon what she
said. But there was a change; for one thing, the Inquisition was demanding
examination of those who experienced paranormal states; and for another, Teresa
herself offered detailed analysis of such experiences as part of a whole
structure of the life of prayer.
In the last books of the Life and in the
Interior Castle, Teresa set down a great deal about the different kinds
of visions experienced by those who pray.(9) They were, perhaps, merely
sensory, perhaps imaginary, perhaps intellectual; if accompanied by physical
phenomena, that was a sign of a weak integration of body and spirit and should
be disregarded. And always the central check for the one praying was
perseverance in the way of charity which is the following of Christ. Teresa did
not refuse to give attention to the subject of visions and saw them as a valid
part of the life of prayer, but it is clear that her approach was more subtle
than that of Hildegard.
Teresa herself was seized by ecstasy of one kind or
another for most of her life, and in order to communicate anything about these
moments of vision, she used new images rather than old arguments or
descriptions. Like all the mystics, she used language of a poetic, mysterious
nature, but here joined to an analytic intellect, which combined both the
experiential and the expository sides of mystical writing in a new way. Her use
of images in describing the way of prayer is very like the explicitly visionary
language of Hildegard. For instance, the central image of the Interior
Castle is a crystal ball shaped like a castle; it is described with intense
imaginative beauty, matching anything in the visions of Hildegard or Mechtild,
and it was revealed to her first of all, it seems, in a vision:
On the eve of the festival of the Most Holy Trinity,
she (Teresa) was thinking what subject she should choose for this treatise,
when God who disposes all things in due form and order granted this desire of
hers and gave her a subject. He showed her a most beautiful crystal globe, made
in the shape of a castle, and containing seven mansions, in the seventh and
innermost of which was the King of Glory, illuminating and beautifying them
all.(10)
It sounds very like a vision of Hildegard, but there is
a distinct difference. Teresa did not simply experience a vision, but saw the
way in which she was to analyse prayer in the form of a vision. Like the men
who wrote about prayer, she provided an interpretation. Given this vision, she
asked herself questions about its precise significance for others. She saw the
crystal ball as the soul, the castle is within, and every visionary detail was
clearly interpreted according to her understanding of prayer. The image in the
vision was linked to the Scriptures and she had good precedent for seeing the
'many mansions' of the Father's house (John 14.2) as the person, the temple of
God which is within. Other writers had used the image, though not in quite the
same way; the Proslogion of Anselm, for instance, begins with an
invitation into the 'inner chamber' where one seeks God who is within, the
ground of being, while Hugh of St Victor used a particular house, Noah's ark,
for his discussion of the life of the soul in prayer.(11) The difference is
that Teresa presented the image as a result of a direct vision from God, and
with this she combined a strict analysis of the life of prayer. The interior
castle was not with Teresa simply an amazing celestial building whose every
piece might be replete with changing, shifting images of wonder; it provided,
rather, a structure for articulating rational thoughts about prayer.
For Teresa such images were not an end in themselves.
She considered prayer, and particularly any visionary experience, to be linked
indissolubly with asceticism; not as a way into prayer but a result of it. From
the other end, so to speak, the body had its place in prayer also for Teresa,
not as the vehicle of divinity so much as the place where love planted in the
heart would then overflow into all the senses and all of life. In this sense it
is interesting to note that for herself, 'betrothal to the Lord' meant acute
desolation and the inner rooms of the crystal castle were full of darkness.
It is necessary to distinguish between Teresa's
deliberate and conscious use of imagery and her accounts of experiences of a
paranormal nature, but in a way they come from the same apprehension of life.
Through both she says prayer is not either emotional or intellectual; mind and
emotion are linked to the flesh for her as much as for Hildegard, and she was
well aware that the impact of the divine upon the human body could take
extraordinary forms. There are what Teresa calls 'lesions', that is, gaps
between vision and experience. For example, absorption in prayer can so
dislocate the normal unity of the self that the one who prays may begin to drop
things, forget things, not react on a natural level very quickly, become
clumsy, not quite functioning, something that was reverenced in earlier mystics
but with Teresa is treated with a brisk compassion. Though Teresa never denied
her own experiences of trance and vision, such manifestations were to be hidden
and disregarded. She saw them as 'the least of the gifts' - not things to be
afraid of, but not to be regarded or sought. They might be of God or they might
not; if they were, then there would be an increase of charity in daily life:
charity towards men, love towards God, a humility which thinks itself unworthy
of notice. For herself, she used to test such revelations by asking others
whose opinion she respected about them. There had been enough false mystics and
some of them close at hand for her to have learned not to trust the externals
even for herself with the simplicity of the earlier mystics.
No doubt Teresa would have classed most of Hildegard's
visions as 'corporal', a kind of vision with which Teresa says she was not
personally acquainted. Her own visions she called either 'imaginary' or
'intellectual', and she discussed them for their content and meaning alone.
What was external in visionary states was for her at best peripheral, at worst
a temptation to pride; they were to be examined with care and related to the
whole of Christian life. The most famous of her own experiences, when she felt
that her heart was being pierced by the fiery spear of a seraph, is an example
both of the similarity of language about mystical experience and the difference
between its apprehension in the early Middle Ages and the sixteenth
century.(12) Hildegard described a vision of seraphs in terms remarkably
similar to those of Teresa:
These signify the Seraphim because they are burning
with the love of God, having a very great desire for the vision of Him . . .
the secrets of God appear in them wonderfully as they do also in those loving
souls who seek eternal life in the sincerity of a pure heart. These love God
ardently and embrace him with a pure desire. (13)
In her Life Teresa also speaks of a seraph and of love,
and this is one of the very rare passages where she describes a 'corporal'
vision of her own:
It pleased the Lord that I should sometimes see the
following vision. I would see beside me, on my left hand, an angel in bodily
form - a type of vision which I am not in the habit of seeing except very
rarely . . . He was not tall but short, and very beautiful, his face so aflame
that he appeared to be one of the highest types of angels who seem to be all
afire ... In his hand I saw a long golden spear and at the end of the iron tip
I seemed to see a point of fire. With this he seemed to pierce my heart ... he
left me completely afire with a great love for God. The pain was so sharp that
it made me utter several moans . . .'(14)
It is clear that Hildegard and Teresa write within the
same tradition of angelic visions but there are significant differences. Both
connect the seraphim with light and with the inner mysteries of the vision of
God and with desire for him. The metaphor of fire has been used for centuries
about prayer connected both with the heart, the most central part of the person
and with the Holy Spirit. While Hildegard records what she 'sees' with
amazement and delight and regards her vision as something to be communicated to
all, Teresa writes about the 'fire' as a personal and inner experience of
immense pain, and of something so intimate that she was distressed when others
connected such things with her. It is significant that the transverberation
happened at the end of her quiet life as a simple Carmelite nun; it overflowed
into the next years of active service of others until her death. The famous
statue by Bernini of Teresa with her heart being pierced by a seraph says
nothing else - love in the centre of the soul, so that it affects every action
and thought. To refer that baroque expression of devotion to Teresa is perhaps
hardly to our taste or in line with our view of her; nor is the equally
well-known poem upon the book and the picture of the 'Seraphical Teresa':
O thou undaunted daughter of desires
by all thy dower of lights
and fires
by all the eagle in thee, all the dove
by all thy lives and
deaths of love
by thy large draughts of intellectual day
and by thy
thirsts of love more large than they
by all thy brim-filled bowls of fierce
desire
by thy last morning draught of liquid fire
by the full kingdom
of that final kiss
that seized thy parting soul and sealed thee His
by
all the heaven thou hadst in Him
fair sister of the seraphim
by all of
him we have in thee
leave nothing of myself in me;
let me so read thy
life that I
unto all life of mine may die.(15)
It sounds much more like Hildegard than Teresa, and the
reality which completed that 'final kiss' did not seern to Teresa like anything
of the kind. A few days before her death, Teresa was carried reluctantly in
extreme sickness to the house of a friend who wanted her there while she, Donna
Anna, bore a child, a sentimental desire to treat Teresa as a saint which she
disliked and mocked. There on 9th October, 1571, she died; she was repeating
over and over again Psalm 51: 'the sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit, a
broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.'
The writings of or about the medieval mystics reveal
some shifts in the way revelation was understood and received from the twelfth
century to the sixteenth. With Hildegard, the fact of her ecstatic states was
authenticating for her other activities; their place in the whole tradition of
Christian life was taken for granted; both she and others were simply impressed
by the actual experiences themselves which were seen as authentication given by
God himself. The visionary states themselves created awe and were left open for
interpretation; the activity and actual influence of the visionaries were
simply the results of the impact of mysterious divinity and it was rare to find
any of the early visionaries exploring and analysing their visions as a scheme
of prayer or of life in detail. Teresa was as much a visionary as any of them,
and exceeded even Hildegard in the activities of her work for the Carmelite
Reform and in the force of her influence on others. But there is a most
significant difference between them, for where Hildegard merely saw, Teresa
analysed and classified. She applied her mind to the analysis of any visionary
experiences, her own or others, and made them a part of a whole structure for
understanding and pursuing the life of prayer and charity. In the case of all
the visionary women, there is a unifying theme of direct and intimate
receptivity in prayer towards divinity which was seen as their 'theology', even
when it was eventually combined with the analytic presentation of prayer. At
least with Teresa, the analysis of visions did not diminish their value as a
direct participation in divine life, however this may have been later. With
her, the rational intellect was seen as balancing and not negating - though at
times as subsidiary to - intuitive understanding, a balance which seems to have
swung in the opposite direction for far too long a period.
NOTES
1. Letters of St Bernard of Clairvaux, trans. Bruno
Scott James (London, 1953), Letter 390, p. 460.
2. Hildegardis Scivias, ed. A. Fuhrkotter, A.
Carlevaris, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, xlii-xliii A
(Turnhout, 1978), Preface, pp. 3-4 (hereinafter referred to as Scivias).
Hildegard's other works are found in PL 197. Of the recent English versions
of Hildegard's works, I have either used the translations provided in Peter
Dronke's excellent chapter, 'Hildegard of Bingen' in Women Writers in the
Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1984) (hereinafter referred to as Dronke) or
attempted my own translation of Hildegard's unusual Latin.
3. Cf. Prayers and Meditations of St Anselm of
Canterbury with the Proslogion, trans. with introduction, Benedicta Ward
(Penguin Books, 1979/87).
4. Hildegard, Liber Divinorum Operum Simplicis
Hominis, Vision 1, PL 197, col. 74.
5. Hildegard, Scivias, 4th Vision, p. 62.
6. Hildegard, Letters, PL 197, col. 1065 (Dronke, p. 153).
7. Hildegard, Causae et Curae, Dronke p. 172; Latin Text, Dronke
p. 241.
8. Thomas de Cantimpre, Vita Baetae Christinae
Mirabilis Trundonopoli in Hasbania, Acta Sanctorum Jul.1,5 (Paris, 1868)
pp. 637-60; English translation by M. King in Medieval Women's Visionary
Literature, ed. E.A. Petroff (Oxford, 1986) pp. 184-9.
9. (The Works of St Teresa will be referred to in the
translations of E. Allison Peers (London, 194-6) by their English titles with
references to chapters only.) Teresa, The Interior Castle, VI.ix,4ff.
Cf. Revelation IV,14. Teresa's discussion of visions is analysed and
compared with the teaching of St John of the Cross by E.W. Trueman Dicken,
The Crucible of'Love: a Study in the Mysticism of St Teresa and St John of
the Cross (London, 1936), pp. 374-406.
10. Teresa, Interior Castle, Introduction, p. 10.
11. Hugh of St Victor, De Arce Noe Morali PL 176.
12. Teresa, Interior Castle, cap. v; Life, xviii. Teresa's
teaching on union is discussed by E. Truman Dicken (op. cit. note 9), pp.
407-30.
13. Hildegard, Scivias, vi, pp. 106-7. 14-. Teresa, Life,
xxix.
15. Richard Crashaw, 'The Flaming Heart: Upon the Book and Picture of
the Seraphical Teresa'.
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