Mechthild of Hackeborn, the "Nightingale of Christ"

Mechthild of Hackeborn (died 19 November 1298)

In 1240 or 1241, Mechthild von Hackeborn-Wippra was born in the castle of Helfta, in Saxony, the younger sister of Gertrude of Hackeborn, who was abbess of the convent of St. Mary of Helfta for forty years, from 1251 until 1291.

A fresco representation of
Mechthild of Hackeborn
(if you look at this hard enough,
it will freak you out)

When she was about seven years old, Mechthild joined her sister at the convent of St. Mary--as historian Bernard McGinn tells us, Mechthild became "the chantress of the house and a teacher and spiritual guide for the younger nuns," including a five-year-old girl named Gertrude, who joined the community in 1261.

The Cistercian convent of Helfta was supported by Saxon nobility, women like Gertrude and Mechilde of Hackeborn; the younger Gertrude was a "girl of unknown parentage."* She would grow up to become a woman we have met before, Gertrude the Great.

As for Mechthild, she was recognized not only for her beautiful voice (in one of her visions, Christ called her his nightingale), but she trained the convent's choir, acting as its director. 

Within the protected walls of their convent, the spiritual lives of the nuns of Helfta flourished. In 1281, Gertrude of Hackeborn experienced a profound vision of Christ; in 1289, she began to write her account of this vision, eventually embedding it into her Legatus memorialis abundantiae divinae pietatis, or The Memorial Herald of the Abundance of Divine Love. 

In 1291, during a serious illness, Mechthild revealed her own visions to her sister and began recording them in the Liber specialis gratiae, or Book of Special Grace. After Gertrude's death in 1292, Mechthild added an account of her sister's life. As Richard Emmerson describes the Book of Special Grace:

Rich in allegory, the seven parts chronicle Mechthild's life and death [the account of her death is added after her death, obviously], her visions, the special graces she experienced, her teachings concerning the true devotion to God and the virtuous life, and fragments of a correspondence with a female friend.

In his extended discussion of what he regards as the "distinctive form" of the mysticism of the women of Helfta, McGinn spends considerable time devoted to Mechthild's most important symbol, the cor Iesu (or cor Dei), the "heart of Christ." For Mechthild, the heart of Christ is "the source of nourishment," "the place of entry and incorporation into God," and a "vital connection," the "living engine that works to unify God and human." Jesus offers her his Sacred Heart as a pledge of his love, as a sacred refuge for her, and as a source of consolation, especially in the hour of death.

In his General Audience for 29 September 2010, Pope Benedict XVI offered an address on the life of St. Mechthild of Hackeborn, which you can access by clicking here. (Interestingly, he confuses Gertrude of Hackeborn and Gertrude the Great, identifying "Gertrude the Great" as Mechthild's sister . . . Oops.) 

I honestly have not been able to find an accessible and affordable English translation of Mechthild's Book of Special Grace in print.  But here's a link to an online book of "selections" from Mechthild of Hackeborn from the Internet Archive. (There is a Middle English translation, published as Booke of Ghostly Grace, but the rare used copies that become available are always prohibitively expensive.) 

Update: Since I originally posted this blog entry, the noted scholar Barbara Newman has completed a translation of The Book of Special Grace, "the first ever in modern English." 

For his discussion of Mechthild, I have relied here on Bernard McGinn's The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism: 1200-1350, volume 3 of his multi-volume The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism.

*As I noted when I posted about the convent at Helfta earlier this year, there is some confusion about whether the monastery at St. Mary's belonged to the Benedictine or Cistercian order. The matter is clarified by McGinn: while the institution was intended--and founded--as a convent of Cistercian nuns in 1229, a Cistercian General Chapter had decided, in 1228, to forbid "further foundation or incorporation of houses for women into the order." Thus, as McGinn explains, the institution "remained technically a Benedictine convent, though one that used the gray habit of Cistercian nuns and followed their usages" (3:267).

Mechthild of Magdeburg and the "Flowing Light of the Godhead"

Mechthild of Magdeburg (Asteroid 873 Mechthild discovered 21 May 1917)

Because we do not know exactly when the Beguine mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg was born or when she died, I have chosen today to post about her--on this day in 1917, the German astronomer Max Wolf discovered an asteroid now known as 873 Mechthild, named after this thirteenth-century woman.

Mechthild of Magdeburg,

Peter-Paul Metz, choirstall, 1896

Church of St. Gordian and Epimachus,

Leutkirch im Allgäu, Germany

What we know about Mechthild's life comes from the work for which she is principally known, The Flowing Light of the Godhead. The biographical details are few--she seems to have been born between 1207 and 1210, the child of a noble family, since she refers to court life and customs.

She writes that she has a brother, Baldwin, who joins the Dominican order and who receives an excellent scholastic education, though Mechthild refers to herself as a "simple spiritual creature" (her work is notable in that, unlike most of the spiritual writing of her contemporaries, it seems to have been written in the vernacular rather than Latin).

Mechthild also tells us that she began her remarkable visionary life at the age of twelve--and that, for the next thirty-one years, "the loving greeting" from the Holy Spirit came to her "every day."

In her work she reveals that when she was a young woman (perhaps about 1230) and "through God's word," she went to Magdeburg to live a life of "renunciation of the world." There she joined a Beguine community and seems also to have grown into a position of leadership within this community.

As I have written in an earlier post, the Beguines were a lay religious movement--Beguines were not associated with any religious order, nor did they live in any officially sanctioned community. They lived an ascetic, spiritual life, devoting themselves to poverty and chastity, working among the poor and ill and modeling their lives on the life of Jesus. To be a Beguine was to live a potentially dangerous life--in a few days I will post on Marguerite Porete, a French Beguine who was burned at the stake for heresy in 1310.

Mechthild writes that she "painfully conquered the body for twenty years"--always tired, weak, and ill, she devoted herself to "sighing, weeping, confession, fasting, watching," following in her life the "glorious suffering" of Jesus. It is at this point, after twenty years of rigorous self-discipline, that her confessor tells Mechthild what God expects of her:

Then he [her confessor] commanded me to do that about which I often weep for shame when I look at my unworthiness: write this book out of God's heart and mouth. This book has thus come lovingly from God and not from the human senses.

For the next fifteen (or so) years, Mechthild records her visions, conversations with God, and revelations. At some point, probably about 1270, she puts aside her "homeless life" and joins the monastery at Helfta, joining the remarkable Gertrude of Hackeborn, her sister Mechthilde of Hackeborn, and a woman we have met before, Gertrude the Great.

Helfta, where Mechthilde of Magdeburg lived at
the end of her life

The reasons for Mechthild's move are not clear--but she was old, she had become blind, and, perhaps more critically, increasing restrictions were being placed on Beguines in Germany and the Low Countries, and Mechthild's own religious claims and her criticisms of the institutional church had made her vulnerable. The date of her death is not certain--there are a wide ranges of dates suggested, from 1282 to 1297.

One of the best accounts of Mechthild as a visionary is Bernard McGinn's, in vol. 3 of his history of western Christian mysticism, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism, 1200-1350. There is a very affordable edition of The Flowing Light of the Godhead, but you can find a good, manageable chunk in Henry Carrigan's Meditations from Mechthild of Magdeburg.

Gertrude the Great: A Woman Finding Her Place

Gertrude the Great (born 6 January 1256)

Denied any "official" role in the Christian church, either as priests, as administrators, or as trained theologians, women nevertheless found a number of ways to participate in the religious life--not only in expected ways, through worship and participation in church festivals and celebrations or as cloistered nuns, but also in unexpected ways, as the life and work of Gertrude of Helfta, ultimately awarded the honorific "the Great," clearly demonstrates.

For many women, the monasteries of the Middle Ages seem to have served as  "cities of ladies," offering them strong female models and bonds, as is the case with Gertrude at the monastery of St. Mary of Helfta.*

When Gertrude entered St. Mary's at the age of four, it was under the direction of Gertrude of Hackeborn, who had made the convent into a center for learning. Gertrude of Hackeborn's sister, Mechthilde, ran the institution's school, trained and directed the choir, and experienced a series of mystical revelations, preserved in The Book of Special Grace. Late in her life, the mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg joined the monastery and this remarkable group of women where she also came to influence the younger Gertrude.

An anonymous painting of
Gertrude the Great,
illustratng her devotion to
the Sacred Heart

During her relatively brief life (she died around the year 1302, at age forty-five or forty-six), Gertrude the Great produced a number of works, all in Latin, including The Herald of Divine Love, her Teachings of Spiritual Exercises, and a compilation of meditations and prayers, the Gertrudian Prayers.

In 2010, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a Vatican address "On St. Gertrude" which makes special note of the significance of all-female communities like that of Helfta:

St. Gertrude the Great, about whom I would like to speak today, takes us also this week to the monastery of Helfta, where some of the masterpieces of feminine Latin-Germanic religious literature were created. Gertrude belonged to this world; she was one of the most famous mystics, the only woman of Germanic descent to be called "the Great" because of her cultural and evangelical stature. With her life and thought she influenced Christian spirituality in a singular way. She was an exceptional woman, gifted with particular natural talents and extraordinary gifts of grace, of most profound humility and ardent zeal for the salvation of her neighbor, of profound communion with God in contemplation and readiness to help the needy.

In Helfta she is systematically compared, so to speak, with her teacher Matilda of Hackeborn . . . ; she was associated with Matilda of Magdeburg, another Medieval mystic; she grew up under the maternal, gentle and exacting care of Abbess Gertrude. From these three sisters of hers she acquired treasures of experience and wisdom; she developed them in her own synthesis, following her religious itinerary with unlimited trust in the Lord. She expresses the richness of spirituality not only in her monastic world, but also and above all in the biblical, liturgical, patristic and Benedictine world, with a most personal stamp and with great communicative effectiveness.

There are many excellent studies of medieval women mystics. On Gertrude the Great and the monastery of Helfta, I particularly recommend Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff's Medieval Women's Visionary Literature, which also contains selections from the visionary texts. And for an unparalleled discussion of Gertrude and her visions in context, see Bernard McGinn's The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism: 1200-1350, volume 3 of his multi-volume The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism.

Gertrude the Great was canonized in 1667. Her feast day is 16 November.

*There is some confusion about whether the monastery at St. Mary's belonged to the Benedictine or Cistercian order. The matter is clarified by McGinn: while the institution was intended--and founded--as a convent of Cistercian nuns in 1229, a Cistercian General Chapter had decided, in 1228, to forbid "further foundation or incorporation of houses for women into the order." Thus, as McGinn explains,  the institution "remained technically a Benedictine convent, though one that used the gray habit of Cistercian nuns and followed their usages" (3:267).