Chapter 4: Development of the path of devotion in the
4.4 Gender implications
part in it. The love with which the soul is to seed God is to be purely spiritual;
the desire and passion and consummation are not to be thought of as in any sense engaging actual bodiliness and sexuality” (Jantzen 1995; 128) She goes on to comment on how utterly unerotic their writings actually are, the focus very clearly being on the spirit and mind, never the physical and sensual. Thus although the language changes, the reality is that there is still just as much hostility to bodies, sexuality and, therefore, women as within the intellectual strands of mysticism.
4.3.4 The shift to embodied spirituality
In the early medieval period we find not just the shift to experience but a far greater emphasis being placed on visions, on the use of poetry, of art and music. The journey into union is no longer a journey of the mind and the intellect, but a journey of the senses, the emotions, the subconscious and the heart. Thus the devotion of this period is characterised by visions, an embodied sensual experience of love and desire, and a resulting felt annihilation of distinction, resulting in union. There is great focus on the humanity and sacred wounds of Christ.
that women begin to teach and preach. Women for the first time, begin to take on the role of mystical teacher such as Clare of Assisi, Angela of Foligno and Catherine of Genoa.
For many of these women, union was not accomplished through withdrawal from the world and its concerns. Union was accomplished through an outpouring of their lives in compassion and care, as it was for Christ in relation to the marginalised and oppressed. This was not a mysticism of abstract philosophical love, but mysticism as learning to love in the concrete realities of life. To „become God‟ is, as Jantzen points out, to become „mighty and just, strong in compassion and in work for justice” (Jantzen 1995; 145).
This is an embodied mysticism not just in the individual body, but in the collective body. It is a socially embodied union.
This shift in mysticism not only had vast theological and social implications;
it also had profound implications within the life of the church. As it was no longer confined to enclosed religious life, and no longer solely communicated through Latin, mystical experience was available to women both within and outside or religious orders. In other words, this mysticism took hold in the wider community outside of ecclesial authority. It is hard to overstate the threat this movement posed to the hierarchy of the church. Indeed, one of the methods the church hierarchy used to attempt to regain control was to judge these women and their writings as heretical; the hierarchy sometimes went so far as to claim they were witches. Whether judged heretical or as witches, there was a public demonstration of repentance or even the death penalty.45 Consequently, the religious climate became increasingly hostile and dangerous. Heresy becomes a dominant theme in the later Middle Ages.
Although it had always been acknowledged that there were those who held theological positions on the fringe, or even outside of established church
45 Marguerite of Porete was burned at the stake in Paris (1310) because her writings were deemed heretical.
teaching, it was not deemed necessary to search them out and require public repentance or even extermination. During these centuries, however, there was a dramatic change. Although charges of witchcraft are historically evident, accusations and convictions thereof were haphazard and rare. Within a short space of time, this radical change led to thousands of people, predominantly women, being accused and charged of witchcraft. Witchcraft came to be seen as the mirror opposite of true mysticism, for if mystics experienced union with God, witches experienced union with the devil.
It was in this climate that Teresa of Avila wrote and lived. It was a hostile climate, with suspicion and attempts to suppress this growing spirituality and mysticism. Many women suffered at the hands of ecclesial authorities. Even within the Beguine communities, survival was threatened and, as Jantzen point out:
From this point on, the beguines tended to develop more formal arrangements, grouping themselves into enclosures, and placing themselves under the direction of a (male) confessor, often a member of one of the mendicant orders. It was the price of survival. Women who sought to live independently pious lives, not under obedience to men, were too vulnerable to accusation of heresy and even witchcraft.
By the beginning of the fifteenth century, all beguines lived in convent (Jantzen 1995; 206).
Jantzen goes on to show how this was only to change in the middle 17th century with the rise of scientific philosophy (characterised as masculine) whose function was to penetrate the mysteries of nature (described in female terms). It is ironical that witch hunts ceased when a new form of social and gender control emerged, and thus they were no longer needed to assert male dominance and control. Mysticism by the 17th and 18th centuries would reshape once again to focus on the private and personal sphere, in ways that still influence us today.
And yet, mysticism according to the women from the 12th century onwards was never separated from the idea of justice and love of one‟s neighbour.
Mysticism for these women was measured consistently not by private and personal states of being, but by its impact for good within the community.