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Love Speaks Here: Michel de Certeaus Mystic Fable

Amy Hollywood

Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality, Volume 12, Number 2, Fall

2012, pp. 198-206 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/scs.2012.0047

For additional information about this article

Access provided by Harvard University (2 Aug 2013 08:13 GMT)

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Love Speaks Here: Michel de CerteausMystic Fable

Amy Hollywood

Spiritus 12 (2012): 198206 2012 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

Very early in The Mystic Fable, Michel de Certeau describes Meister Eck-hart (12601327) and, a hal a century earlier, Hadewijch o Anvers [sic] as

the ounders o mysticsa feld in which specifc procedures will be de-veloped: a space and an apparatus.1 The space, de Certeau goes on to argue,is one o withdrawal; it is an ecstasy, a standing outside o onesel and outside

o history brought about by the seduction o the Other. The apparatus is a

technique in which words coness what they are unable to say. 2 The rapture

and rhetoric de Certeau calls the space and the apparatus o mystics are

governed by exile, nostalgia, and mourning metaphors aptly described by Bren-

na Moore in her paper or this issue oSpiritus.3 Although The Mystic Fabledeals with what de Certeau calls the center o this feld o shiting historical

boundaries, observing mysticism at the moment o its greatest ormalizationand its end,4 the book begins with this brie allusion to Hadewijch and, more

importantly, ends with her.

The fnal pages o the book, to which Moore also alludes, return to

Hadewijch, who is read as standing in a line o continuity with the poet Cath-

erine Pozzi (18821934). A riend o Rainer Maria Rilke, the lover o Paul

Valry, the author o journals modeled on those o Marie Bashkirtse, Pozzis

poetry, according to de Certeau, is part o a thousand-year-old tradition,

that mystic poetics passes rom place to place and age to age.5 Yet as

Moore rightly notes, the continuity is one o a rupture, o an impossibility, oa wandering and an excess that cannot be contained by the very tradition o

which it is a part.

Like de Certeau, I will cite Pozzis poem in its entirety. (He opens the last

section oThe Mystic Fable Overture to a Poetics o the Bodywith thepoem, although curiously, he does not give its title, Ave. The translation

rom the French is by the translator oThe Mystic Fable, Daniel B. Smith.)

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Draped Torso Brian English

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Most high love, i I should die

Without having learned whence I possessed you,

In what sun was your abode

Or in what past your time, at what hourI loved you,

Most high love that passes memory,

Fire no hearth holds that was all my day,

In what destiny you traced my story,

In what slumber your glory was beheld,

Oh my abode . . .

When I am lost to mysel,Divided into the chasm o infnity,

Infnitely when I am broken,

When the present presently enrobing me

Has betrayed,

Through the universe in a thousand bodies shattered,

O a thousand not yet gathered instants,

O winnowed ashes windblown to the heavens void,

You will remake or a strange yearOne sole treasure

You will remake my name and image

O a thousand bodies borne by days away.

Live unity with neither name nor ace,

Spirits heart, oh center o mirage

Most high love.

(Trs haut amour, sil se peut que je meureSans avoir su do je vous possdais,

En quel soleil tait votre demeure

En quel pass votre temps, en quelle heure

Je vous aimais,

Trs haut amour qui passez la mmoire,

Feu sans oyer dont jai ait tout mon jour,

En quel destin vous traciez mon histoire,

En quel sommeil se voyait votre gloire,

O mon sjour . . .

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Quand je serai pour moi-mme perdue

Et divise labme infni,

Infniment, quand je serai rompue,

Quand le present dont je suis revtueAura trahi,

Par lunivers en mille corps brise,

De mille instant non rassembls encor,

De cendre aux cieux jusquau nant vanne,

Vous reerez pour moi une trange anne

Un seul trsor

Vous reerez mon nom et mon imageDe mille corps emports par le jour,

Vive unit sans nom et sans visage,

Coeur de lesprit, centre du mirage

Trs haut amour.)6

The poem is, as de Certeau notes, heavily rhythmic, flled with assonance

and repetition inaudible in the English translationje meure/demeure/quelleheure//mille corps/encore/trsor/mille corpsa chant, de Certeau writes, made

up o variations, oten in m: mou/meu/mais/m/moi/meil/moi-mme/ment.For de Certeau the rhythmic, incantatory quality o Pozzis poem consti-

tutes its unknown site o origin. At the beginning, as in the ancient shaman

or Hindu orms omystics, there is a rhythm. Where does it come rom? Noone knows. It takes over the words, sweeps them away. Its movement is repeti-

tion. These sounds, de Certeau writes, resembling ragments o rerains, orm

an uncanny memory, prior to meaning. One would be hard put to say what it

is the memory o: it recalls something that is not a past; it awakens what the

body does not know about itsel.7 Although de Certeau does not tell us this,

his reading o the poem both coincides with and diverges rom its semantic

content. In Ave, the speaker addresses another, that most high love, who will,

she claims, remake my name and image. Although the speaker o the poem

does not know rom whence this love comes, nor in what past time, at what

hour I loved you, the love that passes memory will, paradoxically, uniy the

speakerperhaps be unifed with the speakerin a uture in which the speaker

will be lost to hersel, scattered in the abyss o the infnite, a time outside o

time in which the present in which she is now clothed will have betrayed her.

Not knowing the origin, not knowing the source o that solicitation toand by the other, does not matter to the speaker o Pozzis poem. The uture to

which she is called, that which will take her out o the present and redeem an

unremembered pastthat is what matters. As de Certeau argues,

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The breakdown o the body and disintegration o time into instants will inex-

plicably give way to the live unity with neither name nor ace. From stanza

to stanza, an itinerary takes shape that is the meaning o experience. It links,

with certainty but neither cause nor reason, the broken I to its recreation by

the most high love.8

Underlying and supporting the lyric I is the You to whom the poem is ad-

dressed (Ave), the one who will remake my name and my image out o the

ragments o history.

For de Certeau, the path o Ave is both near and distant rom Hadewi-

jch. He claims that in Pozzi one sees reappear the experience that in the

thirteenth century Hadewijch o Anvers said is caught up in an eternity with-

out shores and expanded by the unity that absorbs itintelligence o calm

desires, consecrated to total loss in the totality o the immense.9 De Certeau

insists that Hadewijch and Pozzi are both wanderersin the words o Hadewi-

jch, words de Certeau cites, they hasten, those who have glimpsed that truth,

on the dark path,/Untraced, unmarked, all inner.10 According to de Certeau,

He or she is mystic who cannot stop walking and, with the certainty o what

is lacking, knows o every place and object that it is not that; one cannot staythere nor be content with that. Desire creates an excess. Places are exceeded,passed, lost behind it. It makes one go arther, elsewhere. It lives nowhere. It is

inhabited, Hadewijch also said, bya nobleje ne sais quoi, neither this nor that,that leads us, introduces us to and absorbs us in our Origin.11

Here lies, or de Certeau, the putative point o divergence between Hadewijch

and Pozzi, the site o a rupture that, at least in The Mystic Fable, is the marko modernity and o the secular. O that sel-surpassing spirit, seduced by an

impregnable origin or end called God, it seems that what or the most part still

remains, in contemporary culture, is the movement o perpetual departure; as

i, unable to ground itsel in a belie in God any longer, the experience onlykept the orm and not the content o traditional mystics.12

Citing Nelly Sachs and Ren Char, alluding to Arthur Rimbaud, de Cer-

teau insists that today, the traveler no longer has oundation nor goal. Given

over to a nameless desire, he is the drunken boat. Henceorth this desire can

no longer speak to someone. It seems to have become inans, voiceless, moresolitary and lost than beore, or less protected and more radical, ever seeking

a body or poetic locus. It goes on walking, then, tracing itsel out in silence, in

writing.13 (These are the very fnal lines o the book.)

But what does it mean to write o a contemporary culture . . . unable

to ground itsel in a belie in God any longer? What does it mean to read

Hadewijch through and in contradistinction to Pozzi, thereby implying that

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or Hadewijch there is both an origin and an end to the relationship between

this I and that You? And that or Pozzi, there is no oundation or goal?

What about that Love addressed by the very title and invocations o the poem?

Doesnt Pozzi claim to speak to anotherto love itsel? And what about deCerteaus simultaneous demonstration that or Hadewijch there is no end to

wandering?14 For despite his claim that there is an unsuturable gap between the

past and the present, between traditional mystics and its appearance in themodern secular world as a orm without content, de Certeau eectively shows

that there is a tension in both Hadewijch and Pozzi, between claims to unity (i

not a return to origins) and endless wandering. For both Hadewijch and Pozzi

the presentor, perhaps, better, the fniteis always already driven by the

infnite.15

De Certeau both displays and covers over a vital tension here, a tensionbetween traditional conceptions o history in which past, present, and uture

are distinguished rom an eternity in which all is presence, to a conception o

human time as that o a fnitude into which the infnite breaks. What happens

to de Certeaus historical account o Hadewijch, at the origins o a certain

space and apparatus he calls mystics, i Hadewijch hersel calls out or a di-erent conception o history, a conception o history as without oundations,

without origins, without ends, but not or that reason outside o the day to day

lie o the material, physical world? The textual and interpretative questions

are complex, but I think that we can argue minimally that there are two dier-ent conceptions o time operative in Hadewijch. Maximally, we might say that

her understanding o embodiment and the incarnation works to deconstruct

the very orthodox conceptions o time and eternity she sometimes deploys.

I this is right, then Hadewijch and Pozzi point to a crucial limitation in de

Certeaus The Mystic Fable. Hadewijch, like Pozzi, renders impossible the veryquest or unity she seems at times to pursue, or she lives in a world shattered

by the infnite, always both present and absent to itsel, always both in and out

o time. De Certeaus persistent nostalgia or origins blinds him to the ways inwhich Hadewijch reuses the very origin story in which he embeds her.

For on my reading, Love/Minne is both more present and more absent

in Hadewijchs writing than de Certeau will allow. More present, because

Hadewijch claims to speak Love, to experience Love, to be enguled by Love

not in some past to which she has no access, nor in a uture not yet arrived

but in the time out o time that is the movement o the infnite into the fnite.16

Love ruptures time and Hadewijch writesvisions, poems, lettersout o

the space o that rupture. Yet Love is also absent and that absence has many

dierent registers, registers that shit over the course o the letters, the visions,and the poems. The soul who has been enraptured by Love experiences the

end o these gits as absence (Hadewijch, ollowing the Acts o the Apostles,

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calls them consolationsones that we can do without). Hadewijchs genius is

to make the absence o consolation a part o the experience o Gods presence,

or through the suering, exile, and alienation o Loves absence one lives with

Christ in his humanity and, through that imitatio Christi, becomes God withGod.

Yet despite the persistence with which Hadewijch writes and seems to

promise something we will or now translate as repose, to become God

with God does not bring it. In the penultimate o her Visions, Hadewijch

sees a six-winged seraph, under whose wings lie those closest to Minne. From

the highest pair o wings to the lowest, three kinds o Lovers are ound. For

the denial o Love with humility is the highest voice o Love. The work o the

highest fdelity o reason is the clearest and most euphonious voice o Love.

But the noise o the highest unaith is the most delightul voice o Love.17Those who are humble, aithul, andpossessed o the highest unaith havebeen made so deep that they wholly enguled Love and dared to fght her

with sweet and bitter. That which Love gives turns bitter and is consumed and

devoured. That which Love holds back is enriched by great strength to ollow

Loves demand that they be always great like her, so that all Gods artifce may

not separate them rom Love.18

Such souls cannot rest because Love cannot rest. Hell is the seventh

name/o this Love wherein I suer, Hadewijch writes in the fnal o the

Mengeldichten defntively attributed to her:

For there is nothing Love does not engul and damn,

And no one who alls into her

And whom she seizes comes out again,

Because no grace exists there.

As Hell turns everything to ruin,

In love nothing else is acquired

But disquiet and torture without pity;Forever to be in unrest,

Forever assault and new persecution;

To be wholly devoured and enguled

In her unathomable essence,

To ounder unceasingly in heat and cold,

In the deep, insurmountable darkness o Love.

This outdoes the torments o hell.19

Love is unathomable, ever living,/Which with lie receives, in the unity o theTrinity,/God and human in one single love.20 The restlessness o the human

being in Love They who love no longer have virtues to do anything/But

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wander in the storms o Love,/Body and soul, heart and thought/Lovers lost

in this hellis the restlessness o Love itsel. The excess o desire, the capacity

always to desire more, to love more, thatis at the heart o Hadewijchs writing.

She points to a uture when we must conquer, both here and in the Visions,yet she also claims to have conquered now; she claims that to conquer is to beenguled by and to engul a Love that is constantly battling and embattled, that

is infnite and so never total, never whole, that is uncontained and uncontain-

able. But not or thatreason unspeakable; precisely because othis, preciselybecause o its implacability, Love demands speech.

Notes

1. Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Volume 1, The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centu-

ries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University o Chicago Press, 1992), 16 and 14.Further reerences will be parenthetical within the text. Most contemporary scholarship

argues that we do not know enough about Hadewijch to claim even that she is rom

Antwerp. At best we can say that she is rom Brabant, given her language and the prov-

enance o the manuscripts containing her work. See Saskia Murk-Jansen, Hadewijch,

in Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition, c. 1100c. 1500, Alastair Minnisand Rosalynn Voaden, eds. (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2010), 66385.

2. De Certeau, The Mystic Fable, 29.3. Brenna Moore, How to Awaken the Dead: Michel de Certeau, Henri de Lubac, and

the Instabilities between the Past and the Present. For a dierent view, see Philip Shel-

drake, Michel de Certeau: Spirituality and the Practice o Everyday Lie, also in this

issue. Sheldrake reads de Certeau in terms o the historiography o the Annales schooland also as articulating a mysticism o everyday lie deeply rooted in the Ignatian tradi-

tion o which de Certeau was a part. This is all correct, yet de Certeau also persistently

names modern mystics and mysticism as themselves nostalgic. This is clearest in the

closing lines o the book to which I will reer later.

4. De Certeau, Mystic Fable, 16.5. De Certeau, Mystic Fable, 2986. De Certeau, Mystic Fable, 29596. Also in Catherine Pozzi, Pomes (Paris: Gallimard,

1959), 1516. For another translation o the poem, see Sebastion Hayes at http://poz-

zicatherine.org.

7. De Certeau, Mystic Fable, 297.8. De Certeau, Mystic Fable, 298.9. There is still debate about whether these lines, part o a group o Poems in Couplets or

Rhymed Letters ound in three o the fve extant manuscripts o Hadewijchs work, are

indeed by the same author as the other poems, the visions, and the letters. It should be

noted that these poems, Poems in Couplets 1729, contain the most robust accounts

o a union without distinction between the soul and Love, and use a vocabulary o

nakedness, emptiness, and simplicity, and, most importantly or us, emphasis not ound

elsewhere in Hadewijchs work on the frst beginning o things. For Murk-Jansen,

these poems are crucial to complete the picture o Hadewijchs mysticism, and

without them the impact o the collection would be much impoverished. Murk-Jansen,

Hadewijch, 665. The codicological evidence, however, weighs heavily against this

argument. Moreover, in my view, the theological orce o Hadewijchs mysticism ismisunderstood i the poems are included among her works, or they obscure the end-

lessness o desire and the centrality o suering to the mystical lie lived in its ullness.

For the codicological and textual evidence, see Erik Kwakkkel, The Middle Dutch

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Manuscripts, in A Companion to Hadewijch, Patricia Dailey and Veerle Fraeters, eds.(Leiden: Brill, orthcoming); and Alessia Vallarsa, Hadewijch II, in A Companion toHadewijch, Patricia Dailey and Veerle Fraeters, ed. (Leiden: Brill, orthcoming). De Cer-teau cites Hadewijch dAnvers: crits mystiques des Bguines, trans. J.-B. Porion (Paris:

Seuil, 1954), 134. The lines are rom Mengeldichten, 17.10. De Certeau, Mystic Fable, 299.11. De Certeau, Mystic Fable, 299. De Certeau here cites Mengeldichten 18, in Porion,

trans., Hadewijch, p. 141.12. De Certeau, Mystic Fable, 299.13. De Certeau, Mystic Fable, 299.14. Caroline Walker Bynum points to something very close to this distinction when she

describes the shiting understanding o desire in the work o Hadewijch, Mechthild o

Magdeburg (d. ca. 1282), and Marguerite o Oingt (d. 1310), a conception o desire

that will be most ully articulated in Dante. See Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrec-tion o the Body in Western Christianity, 2001336 (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1995), 330; 33441.15. My sense is that, despite his rejection o mysticism, Emmanuel Levinas work will be

useul to articulating this distinction urther. See especially Emmanuel Levinas, Total-ity and Infnity, trans. Alonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).Levinas believed that mysticism was always on the side o totality, a claim with which I

take issue here.

16. This ormulation is indebted to Patricia Daileys wonderul work on Hadewijch. See,

in particular, Patricia Dailey, Time and Memory, in The Cambridge Companion toChristian Mysticism, Amy Hollywood and Patricia Beckman, eds. (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2012).

17. Hadewijch, The Complete Works, trans. Mother Columba Hart (New York: Paulist

Press, 1980), Vision 13, 301.18. Hadewijch, The Complete Works, 300.19. Hadewijch, Complete Works, Poems in Couplets 16, 356.20. Hadewijch, Complete Works, Poems in Couplets 16, 357.