Transcendence

Many of the debates about whether Augustine was a mystic circle around whether he himself claimed to have achieved an experience of the divine or of union with the divine. The Confessions offer clear evidence that he did, but many within the Augustinian tradition continue to be wary about claims to union with the divine. A number of crucial issues are at stake in these debates. The first, of concern more to modern scholars of mysticism than to medieval theologians, is whether mysticism - a term not available in its substantive form within the Middle Ages606 - involves experiences simply of God's presence or of union with God. If claims are made to the latter, as they often are within medieval texts, is this union one in which the soul maintains its own identity or is the soul submerged into the divine? And finally, what is the best way for one to achieve union, however it is understood? Does one come to union through knowledge or love - the mind or the heart - or some combination of the two?

Claims not only to experience God's presence but also some kind of union with God occur throughout the texts of early Christianity; they are arguably found in Augustine and also in Clement (d. c. 215), Origen (c. 185-254), Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-94), in the texts attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite (c. 500), and in a host of martyrological, hagiographical, and monastic texts. In the medieval west, the influence of Augustine and Dionysius looms largest, and both suggest - without clearly asserting - that union involves a dissolution of the self before and in God. Yet the mainstream of the Augustinian tradition, represented by the work of Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) and his fellow Cistercians, as well as that of the twelfth-century Victorines and much thirteenth - and fourteenth-century Franciscan mystical writing, insists on a union of wills in which the soul maintains its identity as other than God even as it feels as if that distinction is lost.

Drawing on i Cor. 6.17 ('Qui autem adhaeret Domino unus spiritus est'-'One who adheres to the Lord is one spirit with him'), Bernard of Clairvaux asks 'when will [the soul] experience this kind of love, so that the mind, drunk with divine love and forgetting itself, making itself like a broken vessel (i Cor. 6.17), marches right into God, and, adhering to him, becomes one spirit with him?'5 Against any who might suggest that the union of the soul's will with that of God is like that between the Father and the Son, Bernard insists that the human person and God 'do not share the same nature or substance' and so 'they cannot be said to be a unity, yet they are with complete truth and accuracy, said to be one spirit, if they cohere with the bond of love. But that unity is caused not so much by the identity of essences as by the concurrence of wills.'6 Bernard thus both asserts that union between the soul and God is possible in this life and that this union never occurs at the expense of the continued creaturely existence of the soul. We come to be one with God

Mysticism (Garden City, N. Y.: Image Books, 1980), 42-55; and Michel de Certeau, “Mystique” au XVIIe siecle: Le probleme du langage “mystique”', in L’homme devant Dieu: Melanges offerts au Fere Henri de Lubac (Paris: Aubier, 1964), vol. 2, 267-91.

5  Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God, in G. R. Evans, trans., Selected Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), X.27, 195. Translation modified.

6  Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs IV, trans. Irene Edmonds (Kalamazoo, Mich: Cistercian Publications, 1980), Sermon 71, n. 7, 54.

When, through God's grace, we have so overcome our sinfulness as to have a wiU that fuUy adheres to God's wiU.

The notion of a union of wills remains central to the theological articulation of mystical experience throughout the Middle Ages. Yet there is a countertrend, one first visible in northern Europe in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries (although there is evidence for similar views espoused contemporaneously south of the Alps). The beguines Hadewijch (c. 1250) and Marguerite Porete (d. 1310) and the Dominican Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1328) suggest that complete union with God occurs when the soul not only overcomes its sinfulness, but also its very creatureliness or createdness. Hadewijch hints at this view in a vision in which an angel shows her an ideal, 'full grown' Hadewijch who is enclosed within the deity and who has never fallen into sin.607 Marguerite Porete goes further, arguing that the truly free and annihilated soul - one who has not only overcome her own sin and will, but who has also destroyed reason, will and desire - exists there 'where she was before she was'.608

Meister Eckhart provides a Neoplatonic framework for such claims. In his commentary on the Prologue to the Gospel of John, Eckhart draws out his understanding of the self-birth of the Godhead, the external emanation of all things from the divine source, and the return of all things to God. Playing on the double meaning of the Latin term principium, Eckhart argues that the opening of the Gospel ('In principio') refers both to the temporal beginning of all things and to their source or principle. For Eckhart, following The Book of Causes and other Neoplatonic sources, that which 'is produced or proceeds from anything is precontained in it' and 'it is preexistent in it as a seed in its principle'.609 Moreover, that which proceeds not only pre-exists in its source, but also remains in its source 'just as it was in the beginning before it came to be'.610 All created things, then, have their principle in another and that principle remains in the other. All of creation has both a virtual and a formal aspect - it therefore has both coeternal and temporal relations to the divine. The grounds for the return of all things to their divine source lies here, for all things have their principle in the divine and, insofar as they remain uncreated with that divine ground, eternally participate in the self-birth of the Godhead and of aU creation.

Eckhart's Latin works provide the ontological framework for his claims there and in his German sermons and treatises that human beings, insofar as they are created, are absolutely other than the Godhead, but, insofar as they are uncreated, are one with the divine ground. Eckhart's German sermons, in particular, call on his listeners to engage in a process of detachment from all creatureliness - most centrally the operations of the intellect and the will - in order to be one with the Godhead without distinction. While others debate whether knowledge or love - the intellect or the will - provide the best means to attain union with God (and hence the substance of the beatific vision),611 Eckhart insists that the truly just human being detaches from both, insofar as they are created, in order to give birth to justice, who is the Son himself:

The Father gives birth to his Son without ceasing; and I say more; he gives me birth, me, his Son and the same Son. I say more: he gives birth not only to me, his Son, but he gives birth to me as himself and himself as me and to me as his being and nature. In the innermost source, there I spring out in the Holy Spirit, where there is one life and one being and one work. Everything God performs is one; therefore he gives me, his Son, birth without any distinction.612