Lost in the Abyss: The Function of Abyss Language in Medieval Mysticism

In the seventh step of her mystical itinerary set forth in the Memorial, Paul Lachance’s favorite mystic, Angela of Foligno, begins to speak of God and divine things as an abyss. “I am convinced,” she says, “that there is no saint, no angel, no creature which has anywhere near the capacity to understand these divine workings and that extremely deep abyss (illud profundissimum abyssum).”¹ A little later she suggests that God’s presence in the soul creates an abyss in her: “God produces in my soul many divine workings with much greater grace and with so deep and ineffable an abyss that this presence of God alone, without any other gifts, is that good that the saints enjoy in eternal life.”² Angela’s use of abyss language becomes more frequent in the Instructiones composed to explain the Memorial. Six of the instructions make use of the abyss to help explain her distinctive form of apophatic mysticism centered on the consciousness of God as the “Unknown Nothingness” (O nihil incognitum!, as she exclaimed on her deathbed). Especially powerful is Instruction 4 which describes her pilgrimage to Assisi. She says that during Mass in the upper basilica she was “led into the infinite abyss of God” and was blessed with “an abyssal absorption into God.”³ This gift was meant not only for Angela, but also for her followers, because she has a vision in which she sees them all swallowed up in God, so that “They seem totally transformed into God as if I see nothing else in them save God, now glorious and now suffering, so that it seems they are totally transubstantiated and inabyssated into Him (totaliter in se transsubstantiasse et inabyssasse).”⁴ Angela has not only forged a neologism, but also made a daring claim for mystical transformation by creating a parallel with the conversion of bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist. (Eckhart was condemned for a similar analogy three decades later.)

Angela was neither the first nor the last medieval mystic to turn to “abyss” and its cognates for expressing the mystery and paradoxes of the human encounter with God. A survey of abyss language in medieval mysticism can tell us much about the biblical basis for mysticism, about negative theology, and about changing models of mystical union.⁵ “Abyss” is a word that has an air of mystery, even an element of the uncanny. Based on the Greek a-byssos, “without bottom,” in Classical Greek it signified the underworld, but in the Middle Ages it came to function as a kind of verbal “black-hole” into which mystics boldly plunged to become lost in God.

One of the things that recommended abyss-language to the mystics was the fact that it was frequently used in the Bible, appearing fifty-one times in the Vulgate. In many places, both in the Old and New Testaments, it keeps the sense of the underworld, or abode of the dead, but other uses go beyond this.⁶ The Hexaemeron speaks of “darkness on the face of the abyss” (Gen. 1:2), indicating the undifferentiated stuff out of which God formed the universe. Psalm 35:7 addresses God saying, “Your judgments are great abysses,” and Psalm 103:6 describes God as clothing himself with the abyss as with a garment. The most mysterious text, and the one that had the most impact on mystical understandings, occurs in Psalm 41:8 (Vg), “Abyss calls out to abyss in the voice of your cataracts; all your heights and your billows have passed over me.” Abyssus abyssum invocat: What abyss is calling out to what other abyss and why? Although Psalm 41, which begins with the deer (i.e., the soul) yearning for the fountains of living water (i.e., God’s presence) was often given a mystical reading by the Fathers, the abyss calling out to the abyss was not.⁷ Augustine provides two readings. First, he interprets the abyss as the impenetrable human heart, so that the abyss calling out to the...