Swimming in the Trinity: Mechthild of Magdeburg's Dynamic Play

And she shall ever more in soul and body soar about and play to her heart's content in my Holy Trinity and drink herself full like the fish in the sea.

—Mechthild of Magdeburg, Flowing Light, V, 25: 28-29

In Flowing Light of the Godhead Mechthild of Magdeburg (c. 1208-c. 1282) sculpts her German vernacular into an evocative work of mystical art.¹ Through prose and poetry, image and movement, this medieval lay woman writes a love story designed to plunge her audience into the source of all love, envisioned as a triune God. She professes that she received her book as a "greeting" directly from the Trinity. She wants to do more than tell about a religious experience, however. She wants to participate in the dynamic creative power of the Trinity by writing about it. By the way in which she writes her theology, she performs it, and draws her audience into full participation of the very doctrines she teaches.

Mechthild offers several insights of particular interest to the study of Christian spirituality. Most profoundly, she offers a playful language, ripe with an inventive drama for Trinitarian explication. She reminds us that we cannot understand the breadth of Christian spiritual writings without careful eye to rhetorical strategies. To do so risks missing what stands at the heart of theological teaching, and especially mystical teaching—the role of human language in describing and evoking the divine.

By providing a close reading of Mechthild's rhetorical strategies, I suggest that Trinitarian speculation can be one of the most profound and valuable sites for understanding Christian expression and experience. These rhetorical reflections can open up the range and creativity of the tradition, not only to celebrate heritage, but to encourage creative adoption and adaptation of historically grounded, rhetorically rich vocabularies for spirituality.² Because beguine texts offer some of the earliest and most rhetorically fervent spiritual works in European vernaculars, I suggest that studies of beguine works like Mechthild's can offer particularly lyrical rewards.

Creative Trinitarian expressions that teach a dynamic link between the soul and the Trinity have been noted before in beguine works. What has not been shown in detail is how Mechthild characterizes a mystical dynamism, and how, through extending mystical movement to the structure and episodes of the text itself, she can help us see the power of mystical language as evocative—drawing out the reader to transform her or him. The text introduces us to a poetic encounter with the Christian God in the form of the Trinity. It performs the work of that Trinity on the reader.³

Mechthild particularly relishes the image-laden power of Trinitarian speculation. She writes hundreds of storylines, all with the point of describing humanity's cyclical, mystical odyssey. By her wealth of images (including: fertile field, noble court, self-contained sphere, bartending scene, stringed instrument, crossbow, and tree⁴ ) and the active tales she weaves with them, she destabilizes any one way of describing Divine essence and pushes her audience to try on the relationality and interaction among the members of the Trinity. In this way, she avoids the presumption that she has perfected language for the divine, and highlights instead her own teaching on the rhythm of a life fully engaged with the Divinity, envisioned and enacted as a dynamic force.

Mechthild's teaching on the Trinitarian-human relationship has clear antecedents in the Christian tradition. One hears echoes, for example, of Richard of St. Victor's passionate charity in her description of love's affects. The works of William of St. Thierry and Bernard of Clairvaux resonate in the erotic nature of divine love and oscillating patterns of longing of absence with joy of ascent to union. Her flights to the interior capture many of Augustine's reflections on the imago dei as an imago trinitatis.⁵ Themes from her Dominican confessor, her...