As we have seen throughout this series, love that is not objective but is based on feelings, oftentimes irrational and lost in passion, is called Eros by the Greeks. This ascending love, per Pope Benedict’s terminology, still contains a spiritual component, one that has led many thinkers, both pagan and Christian, to believe that there is a mystical nature to love.
There have been many Christian mystics who have experienced this union with God through love that Pope Benedict describes. The mystical nature of love was experienced by St. Paul during and after his confrontation with the Risen Christ on the road to Damascus. Likewise, St. Augustine had a mystical experience in a garden that resulted in his immediate conversion to Christianity. Their experiences of Godโs love exude from their individual writings, Paulโs Letters and Augustineโs Confessions. In this essay, we focus on Medieval mystics: Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, and Jean Gerson.
Julian of Norwich
Julian of Norwich was a fourteenth-century hermit without a religious order. She lived in a cell in St. Julianโs Church in England, where she practiced a life of intense prayer and privation. When the plague hit the city, Julian suffered a deathly illness. During her slow recovery, she experienced Godโs love and eventually wrote of her Revelations of Divine Love on the experience.
In one of her mystical visions, she saw a small round item that could fit in the palm of her hand, like a nut, represent Creation, โall that is made.” God told her that โit lasteth, and ever shall [last] for that God loveth it. And so All-thing hath the Being by the love of God.โ This vision also revealed that when earthly things distracts us from God, we cannot rest. Only when nothing distracts us, because of the love of God, will we rest. Humans are part of this symbolic nut that fits in the hand, all of whichโall creatures, all things, all humansโare embraced by God in love. God clothes us, โclaspeth us,โ as the bones are clothed in skin and the heart in the surrounding flesh, in the tenderness of heavenly love.
God โmade man for love,โ and Love redeemed humans of their โfoul black deeds.โ โAll-thingโ abides by Providence, and Julian, recognizing this in her revelations, blissfully sensed God proclaim:
See! I am God: see! I am in all thing: see! I do all thing: see! I lift never mine hands off my works, nor ever shall, without end: see! I lead all thing to the end I ordained it to from without beginning, by the same Might, Wisdom and Love whereby I made it. How should anything be amiss?
In another vision, one that lasted seven nights, Julian witnessed Christ in the full torture of His sufferings and excruciating death. She saw Christ’s offering of love for humankind. She wrote, โthe sweet body was so discoloured, so dry, so shrunken, so deathly, so piteous, as if He had been seven night dead, continually dying. And methought the dying of Christโs flesh was the most pain, and the last, of His Passion.โ
Meister Eckhart
Johannes Eckhart lived several generations before Julian of Norwich. He had been well educated under Albertus Magnus and had been granted a Masterโs degree from the University of Paris. His writings focused on God and Loveโboth ascending love, eros, and descending love, agape.
He understood love as an unquenchable thirst, never satisfied, always in continual longing. Eckhartโs consuming love for God made him realize that this thirst exhibits a need to extend outward, a need for completion, based on an intuitive recognition that something within himself is incomplete. A person seeking love โnever thinks of resting because he is never tired,โ wrote Eckhart. Such is the thirst that Love creates, an unending yearning and therefore an untiring pursuit.
Eckhart argued (per Pope Benedict) that love of human springs from love of God. โLoveโs nature,โ Eckhart wrote, โis such that it appears only where two are; but itself burns out to be one and uniform and never twofold; for love cannot exist divided. In loveโs nature, two function as one, and there is ardor, willing, and longing.โ Love is not selfish, and love is fulfilling. It is not selfless; instead, by sharing and empathizing, one is both giving and receiving satisfaction. Love is a process of giving to another who one sees as oneself through empathy.
Eckhart understood, like Julian of Norwich, that โGod loves for his own sake, acts for his own sake: that means that he loves for the sake of love and acts for the sake of action.โ Humans are made for Godโs love. God loves completely and is never angry, even when humans sin.
Johannes Tauler
A generation before Julian experienced her revelations, a Dominican mystic, Johannes Tauler, had heard Meister Eckhart preach and became associated with his focus on the love of God. Tauler, like Eckhart, treaded on the edge of Church teachings. Tauler conceived of the close association between a human and God. If a human can purify their soul, the human might approach the dwelling place of God. Humans are born from the uncreated and seek to return to the uncreated. Tauler argued that in this life a human can attain the uncreated (God) and form a complete union with Love itself.
Jean Gerson
Tauler influenced the fifteenth-century mystic Jean Gerson, the chancellor University of Paris, who believed that love for God drives a person beyond systematic or speculative theology to a unity with God. He disagreed with the Tauler, however, in the latterโs belief in the possibility of a perfect oneness with God, a fusion where no distinction exists. Gerson did not think a mystical union with God achieved complete oneness. He believed, rather, in the possibility of a mystical, rapturous union with God, one in which the human does not lose self, but rather experiences an extension of the soul via love, a transcendental moment, and a knowledge of God.
Mystics have been a source of inspiration in Catholic theology in part because of their focus on the connection of the love of man with Love itself. Pope Benedict writes in Deus Caritas Est, โman can indeed enter into union with Godโhis primordial aspiration. But this union is no mere fusion, a sinking in the nameless ocean of the Divine; it is a unity which creates love, a unity in which both God and man remain themselves and yet become fully one.โ
Pope Benedictโs definition of the mystical union of man with God recognizes the mystical nature of love while avoiding the heretical lengths to which such mysticism can go. Mysticism can, in focusing on the connection with God in a timeless moment of intense and transformative love, ignore the historical basis of Christianity and its institutional role in mediating the relationship between humans and God. For mystics like Eckhart, the highest authority can appear to be not the Church but the self. Protestants, for example, saw Eckhart, Tauler, and Gerson as precursors to Martin Luther.
A mystic might think that the union of self with God is the central authority in Christianity, rather than Tradition and Scripture. But, as both Paul and Augustine discovered, the isolated transformative moment of conversion might not sustain a lifetime of trials and temptations. Because of this, the convert must return, time and again, to the centeredness of the Church.
Editorโs Note: This article is part of a CE original series on the History of Love, pursuing the meaning of love and our understanding of it throughout time.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
