Female Mystics

The purpose of this paper is to examine several related topics concerned with women mystics of the Middle Ages, focusing especially on Hildegard of Bingen and Elisabeth of Sch"nau. One key issue is whether these women mystics were using their experiences as a way to claim authority and power that would otherwise have been denied to them during this era of European history.

Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was many things: abbess, preacher, prophet, poet, composer, playwright, cosmologist. Long forgotten, her works have in recent decades been rediscovered and republished. Her music has been transcribed, performed, and recorded since about the early 1980s. Her mystical writings have been published in modern editions, and are regarded as being among the most important such writings ever produced in the Western world. And yet, like St. Teresa of Avila, she belonged to the even smaller minority of women who managed to be both imaginative writers and loyal, respected members of the Catholic Church. One may wonder how she achieved this balance.

Hildegard carried on active correspondence with both political and religious figures. These included Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry II of England, Bernard of Clairvaux, four popes (Eugenius III, Anastasius IV, Adrian IV, and Alexander III), and the emperors Conrad III and Frederick Barbarossa. When the latter endorsed one pope and Hildegard backed another, she sent him a scathing, even threatening, letter, saying, "Listen to this, O Kin

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omplete, in the sense that no additional information is essential for salvation. It stands to reason that this sort of hierarchical institution would have to be officially and actually extremely suspicious of anything that seemed to claim to be a new revelation from God, especially when it asserted that individuals could commune directly with the divine, with no need for priestly mediation. (Obviously, this was one issue that led to the Protestant Reformation.) When this tension is combined with that of the subjugation of women as a social class, the result could be explosive. The continuing debate within the Roman Catholic community over whether women can become ordained as priests is a current continuation of exactly this medieval conflict. In addition, it is often asserted by people who have undergone a mystical, ecstatic, or conversion experience that only in that way can one have total, intuitive knowledge of the existence and nature of God. Hadewijch says, "Finding myself welcomed and illuminated in Unity, I understood this essence and knew it more clearly than one can know anything knowable in this world by means of words, reasons, or visions" (RTgnier-Bohler 468). Churches, however, are largely made up of people, es

Category: Philosophy - F