The Paradoxes of Love

The storming of love is what is sweetest within her,
Her deepest abyss is her most beautiful form,
To lose our way in her is to arrive,
To hunger for her is to feed and taste,
Her despairing is sureness of faith,
Her worst wounding is to become whole again,
To waste away for her is to endure,
Her hiding is to find her at all times,
To be tormented for her is to be in good health,
In her concealment she is revealed,
What she withholds, she gives,
Her finest speech is without words,
Her imprisonment is freedom,
Her most painful blow is her sweetest consolation,
Her giving is her taking away,
Her going away is her coming near,
Her deepest silence is her highest song,
Her greatest wrath is her warmest thanks,
Her greatest threatening is remaining true,
Her sadness is the healing of all sorrow.

These beautiful lines about love by the 13th-century mystic Hadewijch of Brabant seem full of paradoxes. Those paradoxes challenge our sense of reason. How can we arrive if we have lost our way? How can something be revealed if it is also concealed? How can something which is given also be taken away? These statements seem to make no sense. Here are some more lines:

For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the barren one
and many are her sons.
I am she whose wedding is great,
and I have not taken a husband.
I am the midwife and she who does not bear.
You who tell the truth about me, lie about me,
and you who have lied about me, tell the truth about me.
But whenever you hide yourselves, I myself will appear.
For whenever you appear, I myself will hide from you.
I am the substance and the one who has no substance.
On the day when I am close to you, you are far away from me,
and on the day when I am far away from you, I am close to you.

These lines seem to voice the same contradictory paradoxes as those of Hadewijch. How can someone who is barren bear many children? How can one of substance have no substance? How can one who is far away also be so close? These two mystic voices seem to be so similar – and yet the second voice predates the first by several centuries, and was not discovered until centuries after the first. The second voice is that of an unknown writer speaking as Sophia, from the text known as ‘Thunder, Perfect Mind’, the Gnostic scripture discovered last century. Clearly there is no way that either writer could have known of the other’s existence, and yet the ideas which they express are wholly sympathetic with each other.

What we seem to encounter in these texts is a common experience: a language of mysticism. We feel that, had she been able to read it, Hadewijch would readily have recognised the experiences described in the older text. But both texts have more in common than apparent paradoxes. Both seem to offer a reassurance, an unstated advice to let go. Not just in the sense of letting go to trust in events, but an urging to let go of forms, of preconceptions, even of a familiar logic. Perhaps this is the clue, the way in to a greater understanding of what this mystic language suggests: that these greater truths are beyond language, beyond the world of forms, of logic, of preconceptions.

Perhaps the marvel in these lines, in both these voices, is their sense of consolation. Both writers convey a sense that ‘all will be well’, in whatever circumstances we might find ourselves. For as we know from our own life’s experience, logic is not always present. Sometimes things just happen, and we are left gasping for breath and wondering why. But in the visionary worlds of Hadewijch and the remarkable unknown writer who is the voice of Sophia, consolation is in the letting go of even trying to understand, of even trying to seek for rational ‘answers’. Consolation comes with an acceptance of paradox, and when we open ourselves to a loving spirit that simple acceptance can be enough.

Painting by Bernardino Luini

If you like to read more about Hadewijch, you are welcome to read my post The Eyesight of the Soul.

The Eyesight of the Soul

The 13th-century mystic Hadewijch of Brabant occupied a place at the very heart of literature in the medieval Low Countries. Through the medium of her spiritual courtly poetry she was the first woman in Europe to risk openly singing of mystical love in a pure poetic form.  This mystic  called her revelatory experiences 'the eye-sight of the soul, which has two eyes: reason and love.' If we have had such experiences, we know that the hardest thing is to attempt to communicate them to others. Language fails us, and we find ourselves floundering in descriptions which, when we hear ourselves say them, seem to us to fall far short of the experiences themselves. But Hadewijch tells us that the soul’s two ‘eyes’ are reason and love. Such an experience might feel as if it is flooded with the love of the Divine, but we still need our capacity to reason – to think about and digest the experience – to give the experience meaning.

This might at first seem like a contradiction, because such a mystic experience happens in a place beyond the borders of our everyday world. It happens in Hadewijch’s ‘eye of love’. But we cannot remain in such a world. The intensity would be unendurable, because we are not meant to be in such a place for any extended length of time. It is not our world: it is, as it were, the realm of the gods. Our natural world is the world of our everyday reality, and it is that world through which we have to navigate our way. It is Hadewijch’s ‘eye of reason’. It seems like our ‘natural world’. But is it really?

Hadewijch reassures us that these realms are not separate, but the two ‘eyes’ which give the soul its vision, because the soul has a place both in the earthly world and in the world of the spirit. But are these two places equal? If we can manage to let go of the familiar borders which we use to define our world of experiences (and it takes an effort!), to let go of all those things which our upbringing, our education, our social habits, have formed around us like a shell which has been hardening since the innocence of our childhood, then we shift inside ourselves towards a realisation that ultimately, all is contained within the realm of the Spirit, within the Divine.

We are fortunate that such mystics as Hadewijch, Beatrijs of Nazareth and Theresa of Avila were gifted enough to articulate their experiences through their writing, and Hildegard of Bingen also through her paintings and her music. We have these riches to inspire us, even if we ourselves have not reached into the places which they did. But Hadewijch also recognised that the road which she called the road of ‘geestelijke minne’ – of spiritual courtly love – is one of uncertainties, of doubts, and can only be trodden in the complete trust and faith which comes with surrender to the Spirit. But she also knew that such a road, once committed to, would lead her further than were she only to allow herself to see with one eye – with the eye of reason.

He who wishes to serve love sublime

must serve with unbounded zest

and suffer in every season and time

if he is to thrive and be blessed

by the knowledge of love ever growing

and in love overflowing,

that stole his heart, his reason, his rhyme.

To serve love in new seasons would 

be new indeed – that noble art 

few will embrace: few feel they should 

find out what true love can impart. 

Never will those cruel strangers know 

how the season that I’ve longed for so

has stolen my heart.

Hadewijch 

Painting by Greg Spalenka