Mechthild of Magdeburg: Listener Questions (Part 2)

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

You're listening to a podcast by the Center for Action and Contemplation. To learn more, visit cac.org.

Kirsten Oates (0:07)

Hello, everyone. I'm here with Jim, and we'd like to invite you to the Turning to the Mystics Online Retreat that we'll be hosting together December 7 to December 10

The topic is The Way of the Mind and The Way of the Heart. And Jim, would you like to share what you'll be teaching on at that retreat?

James Finley (0:27)

Yes, first of all, I'm looking forward to our time together for this retreat. And also, it was so interesting this last season where we went through Meister Eckhart and the profound teaching on the divinized mind, like the mystically awakened mind. And then Mechthild of Magdeburg, one of the beginnings is a love mystic.

And when you put them side by side, you see how the awakened mind and the awakened heart illuminate each other. And I like to explore that in ways that pertains to our daily life. Like where do we experience that and how can we deepen that and so we can explore it together. So I look forward to it.

Kirsten Oates (1:06)

Yes, it sounds wonderful. Thank you so much, Jim.

So please join us and you can learn more and register at cac.org forward slash retreat. That's cac.org forward slash retreat. We look forward to seeing you there.

James Finley (1:24)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates (1:27)

And I'm Kirsten Oates.

James Finley (1:29)

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates (1:39)

Welcome, everyone, to season eight of Turning to the Mystics, where we've been turning to Mechthild of Magdeburg. And I'm here with Jim, and this is part two of our Reflection on Listener Questions.

Welcome, Jim.

James Finley (1:54)

Yes, good to be here.

Kirsten Oates (1:55)

Beautiful first episode with the questions, and looking forward to.

Getting to some more, yeah.

So we're gonna start with some questions about Mechthild the person, and I'll just read the first one from Sheila. And she says, I've been so enjoying the podcasts about Mechthild of Magdeburg. She's typically not well known outside of Germany. So I appreciate hearing about her in an English speaking context. Fun fact, I live in Berlin, which is not far from Magdeburg. The information about the Beguines is fascinating, and I've been really sitting with the sentence that God wants to rest weightless in our souls. I have a question about Mechthild's view of the body. The Wikipedia article in Germany states that she was a flagellant for about 20 years and had a hateful view of her body, which seems to be in great contrast with the view of Hildegard of Bingen, for example. What have you come across in your research and reading of her texts about this? And how do you think that her views influenced her spirituality? I also wonder how she could have lived for so long if she didn't take care of her physical body.

James Finley (3:07)

Through the Middle Ages and on into when Mechthild was living, there was this theme in the Christian tradition of doing physical penance to the body.

And I share in too, when I was in the monastery, this assertion order, which was really found in the 11th century by St. Bernard of Clairvaux. We'll be doing him later in the series. And then that was a reform of the rule of Benedict, which is the 5th century.

And in that time, so when I was at the monastery, this cloistered monastery, just before the Vatican Consul, they changed a lot of this medieval stuff to that we would take the discipline.

And every Friday, we'd go to, we sat in a common, unheated dormitory with partitions, with a curtain. It was a straw mattress on boards. You would go in and close the curtain, strip to the waist. You had to whip under your pillow, a cat and nine tails. And the abbot would give the knock. And everyone would whip themselves over with the shoulders for the length of the psalm. They profund us out of the depths I cry unto the Lord. And the abbot would give the knock. You put it under your pillow and go have breakfast. And it was just part of the thing. So my sense is it's a cultural thing.

But I get the feeling that it didn't find its way into pathological attitudes towards your body. None of that comes across in our talk. Quite the opposite, actually. So I think she took it in stride.

And the same way Merton did, but the novices, he would talk about it, make jokes about it, and these medieval rules and so on. So I think she was freed from that. Not all the women mystics were. Some of these mystics, they were, you can see, tinges of where it was affecting a negative attitude towards the body. And it goes into other sources, too, like Plotinus, and the Greek thing about the body and trying to rise above the body and so on. So it's just part of the historical evolution of things. We're lucky this way. We have our own problems today with things. But I think we do have a much healthier sense of the reality of the importance and gift of the body. And you don't see that in the Catholic tradition this way.