Binding Love

Creation, the Soul, and God in Mechthild von Magdeburg’s "The Flowing Light of the Godhead" By Ailie M. Posillico

Beginning in 1250, and for fifteen years after, a wandering German preacher and teacher named Mechthild von Magdeburg wrote seven books which she compiled into one: The Flowing Light of the Godhead¹. In it, Mechthild gives voices to God. Staging God in conversations between characters –the Soul, Love, Lady Pain, Knowledge, a “Mistress and Queen,” the Lord, a Bride, a narrating “I,” –to name a few, Mechthild outlines a theology wherein all of creation is bound to God by love:

“What are you made of, Soul, that you ascend so high above all creatures, mingle with The Holy Trinity, and yet remain whole in yourself?” one voice of the book asks. “You have brought up the question of my origin,” responds the voice of the Soul. “I shall tell you honestly: I was made by love in that very place [of The Holy Trinity]. For that reason,” the voice of the Soul continues, no creature “is able to give comfort to my noble nature or to open it up except love alone” (50).

The Measure of the Side Wound and the Body of Christ, Germany c. 1484/1492, Rosenwald Collection, The National Gallery of Art.

The Soul of creation is made of, comforted, and opened by God’s love, and, what’s more, the Soul cannot help but love God in return: “the Soul is bound, she has to love,” Mechthild writes (92). Emphasizing the Soul’s nature to love God, in Book One, for example, she says,

A fish in water does not drown.
A bird in the air does not plummet.
Gold in fire does not perish.
Rather, it gets its purity and its radiant color there.
God has created all creatures to live according to their nature,”
How, then, am I to resist my nature?
I must go from all things to God,
Who is my Father by nature,
My Brother by his humanity,
My Bridegroom by love,
And I his bride from all eternity (46).

In Mechthild’s theology, the Soul cannot help but be bound in love to God. In fact, there never was a time when God was not a part of all that is: “Where was God before God created anything?” one voice in Book Six asks. “God was in Godself and all things were as present and as manifest to him as they are today,” responds a second. “What form did our Lord God have then?” the first voice asks. The knowing second voice replies,

Exactly like that of a sphere, and all things were enclosed within God with no lock and no door. The lowest part of the sphere is a bottomless foundation beneath all abysses. The highest part of the sphere is a top above which there is nothing. The circumference of the sphere is an unmeasurable circle. At this point God had not yet become the Creator.

According to this image, creation was always already enclosed in God. There was never a time nor place when God was not (257).

Mechthild’s image of creation is one of wholeness, of being knit through a kind of connection between all things and God in love that was always already present in all of creation. Yet Love according to Mechthild is not just a state by which all creation is bound, Love is not just generativity and possibility according to Mechthild, but something tortuous and tormenting as well. That is, Love as Mechthild portrays her is infinite and binding, but she binds in way that sends her lovers sinking to the depths of hell: “You have hunted me, trapped me, bound me, and wounded me so deeply that I shall never be healthy again,” the Soul says to Love. “You have meted out to me many a cudgel blow. Tell me, am I ever going to recover from you?” The Soul asks Love. “If I were not going to be killed by your hand, it would be better for me never to have known you,” the Soul says. Love chidingly responds:

“That I hunted you was my fancy.
That I captured you was my desire.
That I bound you made me happy.
When I wounded you, you were joined to me.
When I cudgel you, I take you into my power.”

Love, continuing, admits that it was she and not evil nor sin, she says, who “drove God the almighty from heaven;” that it was in fact Love, not human fault, that “took his human life,” and “returned him to God in honor.” “How do you, vile worm, expect to survive before me?” Love asks the Soul (42).

Throughout the images and questions posed by the voices of her book, Mechthild offers her readers a theology. In it, she explains Love as a generative force that compels God from the gates of heaven to earth, something that knits all of creation to God, and through which creation returns to God by the nature of being. If Love is generative, though, if it binds all of creation and is the ground through which creation returns to God, then it is also a tormenting force; Love hunts and captures the Soul, she cudgels and wounds her, and this is the way in which Love takes the Soul in, encloses her in her power so that there is no thing outside of the Soul and Love. “How do you expect to survive me?” Love asks.

In Mechthild’s telling, Love is binding, a knitting force between the Soul and God and creation that generates created life, but if she is, she is also a force that brings wounding and pain, for to live in love, which is to live at all, is to live wounded, open to being bound to God and one’s others in and as a wound.

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AUTHOR

Ailie is a doctoral candidate at Villanova University studying medieval Western European Christian history, German literature, and the form of the letter in medieval theology. She was a writer in residence at Mount Saint Benedict in 2022.

1. Mechthild von Magdeburg, Mechthild von Magdeburg: The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. Frank Tobin, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York & Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1998). (Note: I have modified all pronouns for “God” to reflect gender neutral pronouns in the translations included here)