In recent years the study of the beguine mystics has benefited richly from insights from queer theory. Scholars like Amy Hollywood and Karma Lochrie have offered queering readings of medieval texts such as the poetry of Hadewijch and Mechthild of Magdeburg’s Flowing Light of the Godhead.¹ My aims are complementary, yet separate. Rather than queering the beguines, I will examine ways in which the beguines were themselves queerers. To make this argument will require two parallel claims: first, that the theologies of the two beguines are explicitly erotic, and that this erotic theology is queer in nature (specifically, that they view the God they profess to love as in some way female, reflected into the soul via a series of inversions and paradoxes). Through such reversals, the beguines were able to create an embodied theology more radical and transgressive than that of their contemporaries who worked within the ecclesiastical hierarchy as nuns. This will be made explicit by placing these thinkers in dialogue with the Belgian psychoanalytic feminist Luce Irigaray.

The theology Hadewijch teaches in her poems, letters, and visions is explicitly erotic. Love is central to Hadewijch’s understanding of the divine. While she begins from the orthodox position expounded in 1 John 4:8 that “God is Love,” from there she moves in directions ranging from the ambiguous to the downright heretical. Hadewijch is not a systematic theologian in the way that some of her male contemporaries are, or as later mystics of both genders would be. As such, finding a passage to encapsulate Hadewijch’s view of Love is incredibly difficult. Her theology of Love is complex and even contradictory. Love is at times a noble yet cruel Lady, a feudal Lord, the cause of suffering, a conqueror, the object of conquest, the means of unity with God, and even potentially greater than God.²  Despite her great love for Love, Hadewijch sometimes finds herself deeply dissatisfied with her Lady, even comparing her to Hell in her final stanzaic poem.³  Perhaps the best encapsulation of Hadewijch’s erotic theology is her ecstatic exclamation: “Love is all!”⁴ 

Love plays a crucial role in the theology of Mechthild, as well. Like Hadewijch, she was influenced in both form and content by the courtly romance literature popular at the time. In addition, the German beguine drew upon the bridal mysticism tradition with roots in the Song of Songs to a greater extent than did her Belgian counterpart.⁵  The Flowing Light of the Godhead is at times intensely and dazzlingly sensual, casting Mechthild as “love-starved bride” and lover of Christ—and, in fact, the entire Trinity.⁶

In one of the first “greetings” (Mechthild’s term of choice for heavenly visions and visitations) that she recounts, the Lord tells her “Take off your clothes,” so that “not the slightest thing can be between you and me.”⁷  Earlier in the text, Mechthild is offered the chance to suckle the infant Christ. She refuses, almost offended: “That is child’s love, that one suckle and rock a baby. I am a full-grown bride. I want to go to my Lover.”⁸  Themes and images echoed throughout the text include the bridal bed, tasting, touching and caressing, and kissing.⁹  Like a courtly minnesinger, Mechthild coyly (and at times cheekily) obscures the details of her greetings: “Brides may not tell everything they experience.”¹⁰ Clearly then, eroticism is integral to the theologies of both Hadewijch and Mechthild. While the categories of the physical and the theological are not fully merged, the love for God and the love for one another are not as separate for the beguines as they are in more traditional works of mysticism.

In a letter to a younger beguine, Hadewijch chastises the reader: “O beloved, why has not Love sufficiently overwhelmed you and engulfed you in her abyss?…why do you not fall deep into her? And why do you not touch God deeply enough in the abyss of his Nature, which is so unfathomable?”¹¹  This quote contains many of the key elements of Hadewijch’s theology mentioned above—the abyssal nature of God/Love, the interplay and melding of the two figures in her thought, and the need to be overwhelmed and engulfed by the divinity, to “fall deep into her.” For Hadewijch, not only is the divinity an abyss, but the soul as well:

the soul is a bottomless abyss in which God suffices to himself…Soul is a way for the passage of God from his depths into his liberty; and God is a way for the passage of the soul into its liberty, that is, his inmost depths, which cannot be touched except by the soul’s abyss.¹² 

Mechthild as well utilizes abyssal imagery in her depiction of God, although not to the same extent as Hadewijch. She praises God’s “lofty crag” and later discusses her spiritual progression as an ecstatic downward motion: “the deeper I sink / The sweeter I drink.”¹³  Grace Jantzen has noted the beguine usage of abyssal imagery, identifying the implicit vaginal and uterine connotations.¹⁴  By treating both Love/God and the soul as womb-like abysses which enter into and fold in upon one another, Hadewijch and Mechthild create a queer, lesbian-like image of the union of soul and God.

Much of this abyssal imagery in beguine theology is reminiscent of Belgian philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray’s discussion of the vagina. She describes woman as touching herself, “all the time…for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus within herself, she is already two—but not divisible into one(s)—that caress each other.”¹⁵  This idea of multiple aspects, irreducible into separate parts, constantly caressing one another, is remarkably similar to Mechthild’s account of the Three Persons of the Trinity. In a poetic and euphoric speech directed at the Trinity, she describes God as he existed before the Creation:
^‍

^‍before our time when you, Lord, were enclosed within yourself alone and your indescribable bliss was shared by no one. The Three Persons sent forth beautifully the beams of light in unison, each of them illumined by the other while remaining utterly one.¹⁶ 

Just like the vulva as Irigaray describes it, God is self-enclosed and euphorically self-touching.

Further parallels between Irigaray’s vaginal lips and Mechthild’s Trinitarian God can be found in the irreducibility of each to language. Irigaray describes the “‘elsewhere’ of feminine pleasure” as “neither on the near side, the empirical realm that is opaque to all language, nor on the far side, the self-sufficient infinite of the God of men.”¹⁷  This “playful crossing” allows “woman to rediscover the place of her ‘self-affection.’ Of her ‘god.’”¹⁸ Similarly, Mechthild’s ecstatic greetings take her, in a sense, outside of herself, to a realm between the infinite and the embodied where she can find her “self-affection.” She writes: “the grand expanse and sweet eternity and the…special intimacy that unceasingly exists between God and each individual soul is of such overwhelming tenderness that…I [am] incapable of describing it.”¹⁹

Just as both God and the soul are vaginal and must playfully and ecstatically enter into one another, the wound in Christ’s side is, for Mechthild, a vaginal locus of mystical pleasure. She describes being “buried” in Christ’s side, and later proclaims that her “five senses may and shall constantly rejoice in the bloody lance and in the wound of [Christ’s] heart.”²⁰  In her discussion of mysticism, Irigaray examines the queer, erotic relationship of the feminine mystic to “that glorious slit” in the side of Christ, “where she curls up as if in her nest.”²¹  She continues to describe the “abyss” of this wound, and the blood flowing forth, which allows for an identification of female soul and God, and even a deification of the soul. Ultimately, “the abyss opens down into my own self, and I am no longer cut in two opposing directions of sheer elevation to the sky and sheer fall to the depths.”²²  In the ecstatic moment of union with God, all spatial and hierarchical distinctions are eliminated. As Mechthild describes it, “Downward I reach… / Upward I yearn.”²³ 

Shortly after when Hadewijch and Mechthild were writing, Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls would achieve wider notoriety. Due to the radical nature of her arguments—even more radical than the earlier beguines—she would be put to death as a heretic. This execution effectively quashed the beguine movement and prevented any wide influence of the radical ideas of these women, except in the form of appropriated ideas by later (male) mystics, such as Jan van Ruusbroec and Meister Eckhart.²⁴ 

In her discussion of the medieval and early modern female mystics, Luce Irigaray is ultimately pessimistic regarding their success as a path for the philosophical liberation of women—for the creation of a feminine imaginary.²⁵  However, her discussion of mysticism is admittedly limited. She only directly quotes three mystics—two of which are male. Furthermore, the women mystics she alludes to all work within the ecclesiastical hierarchy. As Amy Hollywood argues,

attention to these earlier women’s texts [such as those of Hadewijch and Mechthild], then, complicates Irigaray’s account of mystical religiosity and reveal[s] a radicality of vision only suggested by her…Irigaray’s ahistoricism here weakens her account of mysticism.²⁶ 

This is not to discount Irigaray’s project of the creation of a feminine imaginary. Rather, it is to argue that the incorporation of the more radical medieval mystical works such as Hadewijch’s and Mechthild’s may strengthen her work, offering the feminine counter-discourse she sought in the phallogocentric history of Western philosophy. While the beguines have historically had little direct influence on theology, in the contemporary feminist atmosphere of searching for a nonoppressive space for the feminine in the divine, now may be the time for the works of Hadewijch and Mechthild to be read with renewed interest.