This blog post is part of the 'Theology & Art' project
by Sander Vloebergs
Embodiment and artistic expression are closely intertwined. To understand this relation between art, embodiment, contemplation and spirituality, one has to understand the relation between inner and outer person, between inspiration and articulation, and action and contemplation.
Inner and Outer Person: Visualizing Theology
In my previous blog I introduced the research of Barbara Newman who has proposed the concept of imaginative theology. Images are the main source for this kind of theology. Practicing this kind of theology is like writing a play, a choreography, where ideas are performed. In this blog I will develop my artistic-theological approach to my work on Hadewijch.
Hadewijch, a Dutch female mystic (from whom we have little to none biographical information, except that she lived in the first half of the thirteenth century) is a talented writer who incorporated visions (and images) into her theology. Besides visions she also wrote letters and poems. These poems were songs, composed on the basis of existing songs of troubadours and performed for an audience. She created an interesting dialogue between the profane courtly literature and the religious literary tradition. Inspired by both traditions she started a quest to find and experience the depths of divine Love, which she calls Minne. Hadewijch is an excellent teacher, a guide who tries to capture her audience/readers in Love’s divine embrace, to walk with them the path to religious maturity. Her teaching (her School of Love) consists of images, visions, songs and art. The focal point of her mystical work is Divine Love who touches both author and reader.
In her book Promised Bodies (2016), Patricia Dailey argues that the tension between the experience and the articulation of Hadewijch’s mystical theology, or between her mystical experience and her werke (work and teaching) allows a dialectical exercise that involves the inner and the outer person. The inner person is capable of experiencing a unity between the human person and God, a unity that will become reality in an eschatological time. The outer person (the person in the world) articulates this experienced promise of eschatological unity in time and space.
The time of the mystic’s body thus needs to be read – and is often read by the mystic and hagiographer – along the syncopated measure of a time that is not its own, the time of the inner person that animates the body and the memory of an experience or consciousness of divinity that recalls an atemporal moment to which the mystic is bound and seeks to return. This atemporal moment orients and punctuates the mystic’s texts and persons, in turn providing an underpinning that sets a measure for the work. (p. 22)
Dailey argues that the expression of this theological experiential knowledge is a task the mystic needs to perform. She can do this by translating her ecstatic experience into comprehensible language, in stories full of imagery that invoke new divine experiences in her surroundings. Hadewijch uses images in her visions and poetic language in her songs in her quest to incarnate the eternal divine and transform the material bodies of time into divine promised bodies.
I agree with Dailey that the mystic experiences an urge (like the need for expression after a traumatic event) to express her divine encounter. This event wounds the mystic existentially (this vulnerability is also a part of the artistic process). Dailey writes:
In the register of historical time, this unlived experience continues to haunt the mystic, often in the somatic form of bodily pain, and assumes a structure similar to that of the unassimilated memory of a traumatic event. The body’s pain or even the body’s memory of passing away into blissful indistinction carries within it the force of recall of what the soul could not sustain, that is, the affective and spiritual “overflow” of divine essence, what Hadewijch calls the “abyss”, at the moment of the vision itself. (p. 83)
Nevertheless, for Dailey this mystical encounter only implies the apophatic moment of supra-rational rupture which is experienced in the visions. The privation and the painful absence of the divine Love experience in the post-ecstatic state would be the main topic of Hadewijch’s poems. So the inner person’s experience seems to belong to the realm of vision while the outer person’s werke seems to belong to the realm of the poetic aftermath in time. But I don’t believe Hadewijch’s work allows such black-and-white division. For me, Hadewijch’s imagery crosses the borders between genres. The innermost mystical experience includes images and painful moments while the outer person finds divine inspiration in the temporal world. Hadewijch uses the genres of poems and visions as a means to create an imaginative world that challenges the reader/audience/viewer to transform (like a good art piece does).
Active Contemplation: Becoming Human through Art
Christopher Dustin and Joanna Ziegler present in their work Practicing Mortality (2016) a refreshing perspective on the modern practice of art and philosophy. The authors are interested in philosophy as a way of life in contrast with an academic (often scholastic) philosophy. They imagine philosophy as a kind of practice and argue that contemplation also has an active component. They want to teach their readers (and students) a way of seeing that can only be accomplished by embracing creativity.
... the recovery of the inner, we shall argue, requires faithful attention to and a certain kind of reverence for the “outer”. The spirituality that comes to the fore here is coupled with a renewed sense of, and appreciation for, materiality – both our own and that of the world around us (p. 4).
I see this renewed sense of materiality as necessary to understand Hadewijch’s contemplative seeing. Furthermore, we can see a similarity between the locus of creativity in the everyday life (that Dustin and Ziegler propose) and the realm of werke (that Dailey places after the vision). According to Dustin and Ziegler creative activities are woven into everyday life.
It is difficult for us to conceive of craft in anything but aesthetic or utilitarian terms, or some awkward combination of both. This may be part of the reason why we have so much trouble acknowledging any inherent connection between craft (what is man-made) and the divine (or what is God-made)… We may be prepared to think that art can bring us closer to God, but , we seem to find craft too burdened by practical purposes and utilitarian aims, too human or everyday, to allow us access to “the hidden ultimate reason of the living universe.” (p. 144-145)
Might not this prejudice about the material everyday life have led to Dailey’s division between the divine ecstatic encounter and the temporal realm of werke? I think the bodily division between outer and inner world is much more porous, allowing a constant flux of inspiring images that form and are formed by the artist/mystic. It is hard to imagine that Hadewijch herself was not inspired by the world around her, her relationship with her fellow humans and the cosmos. With the words of Dustin and Ziegler, I would call Hadewijch a theoros: someone who sees, an active participant of sacred spectacles.
By harboring mystery, such spectacles move us to wonder. It may be worth noting here that the ancient sources often use theoros to refer to a person who travels to a sacred place to consult an oracle. Oracular sayings are not simply informative. They are revelatory, but also notoriously obscure. The wonder to which they give rise is inseparable from the illumination they promise. (p. 10-11)
We can easily imagine Hadewijch’s visions as a sacred journey to an oracle. It would be a crucial mistake to separate the apophatic moment of divine revelation from the sacred journey that leads to it and returns from it.
If theoria involves an attentive seeing, with wondering eyes, of a divine or beautifully made thing, techne involves the making visible, in a thoroughly materialized way, of something that is seen as divinely made, even if it is man-made. The skilled craftsman was himself a theoros. His making is grounded in and provides an occasion for contemplative seeing … If we fail to understand the practicality of contemplative seeing, it is because we fail to understand how it is originally related to craft: not in the way that it produces a useful result, but in the way that techne itself was originally understood as both a revelation and a realization of the divine. (p.146)
From Theory to Practice, and back again
Hadewijch is a theoros who wants to guide us on a sacred journey towards Divine Love. Her work is often studied as a literary masterpiece (by analyzing the literary methods) and theoretical discourse (by studying the imagery and the mystical theology). But would it not be interesting to combine both theoretical methods of studying art and theology with a practical exercise of contemplative seeing and craft making? For contemporary scholars, art is a foreigner in the academic disciplines, interesting as all exotic products are, but rarely practiced and rarely taken serious. My feeling is that we cannot ignore the process of art-making in our contemplative theoretical education, definitely not if we study authors such as Hadewijch. We have to follow her guidance and engage in the same dialogue between theory and practice, inspiration and actualization
Under the section 'Theology & Art' a series of blog posts can be found that were generated on my journey into imaginative theology.