Érintés és belső tér: a misztikus beszéd forrása
Inner Space and Divine Touch: The Source of Mystical Speech

Hadewijch Meeting St. Augustine – Imitatio Augustini?

Summary/Abstract: Hadewijch, the 13th century beguine, the mystical leader of a group of like-minded women, is the author of 31 mystical letters, 16 rhymed letters, 14 visions and 45 mystical love songs. She used her immense talents and her literary and theological knowledge in order to provide spiritual guidance in a powerful language. She probably aimed at a kind of speech that once filled her when she heard a sermon about St. Augustine: “No sooner had I heard it than I became inwardly so on fire that it seemed to me everything on earth must be set ablaze by the flame I felt within me. Love is all!” (Letter 25) From her writings it is obvious that she was deeply – we could even say: intimately – attracted to St. Augustine, whom she mentions four times in her visions and letters. In Vision 11 Hadewijch and Augustine appear as two eagles. They are swallowed by a phoenix representing the Unity in which the Trinity dwells, and they are flying about incessantly in the deep abyss of Unity. She says she greatly desired to experience divine love in the Trinity with Augustine. In the List of the Perfect attached to the Visions, she gives the names of people dead and alive who, in her view, reached perfection during their lives, or, in other words, who “grew up in Love.” St. Augustine is the 11th Perfect. The way she writes about him here is like a vision itself: Augustine is tortured by the awareness of his weakness, but then he casts off humility and lets himself be swept away by the “Storm of Unfaith.” This storm is, as we understand from the related Vision 13, the highest gift of Love and comes forth from the Divine Touch. Those who get this gift are thrown into the abyss of Love – the same space where Hadewijch and Augustine have been swallowed by in Vision 11. What Hadewijch writes about Augustine in the List is exactly what she is striving for and reaches in Vision 13, and which she asks her followers to reach. In the Letters St. Augustine is mentioned in the context of mystical speech. When in Letter 22 Hadewijch writes about the ineffability of God, she quotes Augustine and points out that one can interpret something of God only for those who understand with their souls. What follows is the depiction of the unimaginable dimensions of the Divinity put in a kind of “langugae of the ineffable.” If we first read the texts in which Hadewijch makes mention of Augustine and then examine the attributes of space in the state of perfection, in her whole oeuvre, we can get a glimpse of the deepest layers of Hadewijch’s mysticism, the inner space of the forces that touch the mystic and give shape to the specific mystical language of the Ineffable Hadewijch was a master of.

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