Mystics of the Rhine Valley
This week’s meditations will explore some of the mystics of the European Rhine Valley from medieval times until the 20th century. Father Richard Rohr begins:
We live in a time of both crisis and opportunity. While there are many reasons to be anxious today, I still have hope, not only in God, but in the fact that many Westerners, including Christians, are rediscovering the value of nonduality: a way of thinking, acting, reconciling, boundary-crossing, and bridge-building based on inner experience of God and God’s Spirit moving in the world. It moves us beyond binary, either-or, us-against-them mentality. To be clear, nondual thinking isn’t about throwing out our rational mind or refusing to act against injustice; it’s about growing in mystical, contemplative, and unitive consciousness. When we have both, we’re able to see more broadly, deeply, wisely, and lovingly. We can collaborate on creative solutions to today’s problems. I’m encouraged that there’s renewed appreciation in the Christian tradition for people like the mystics who model such wholeness. [1]
My own cultural roots are in the Rhineland of Northern Europe. The Rhineland mystics were mostly German-speaking spiritual writers, preachers, and teachers, who lived largely between the 11th and 15th centuries. Their importance has only recently been rediscovered. The “trans-alpine” Church (meaning those on the other side of the Alps from Rome) always enjoyed a certain degree of freedom from Roman oversight and control, simply by reason of distance, and drew upon different sources and inspirations than did the “cis-alpine” Church of Italy, France, and Spain. The Rhineland Mystics were outstanding in their courage and very creative viewpoints.
Some of the most familiar Rhineland mystics would include the Benedictines Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) and Gertrude the Great (1256–1302); the Beguine Mechthild of Magdeburg (c. 1212–c. 1282); the Dominicans, including Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1327), Johannes Tauler (c. 1300–1361), and Henry Suso (1295–1366); and Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464). A more recent Rhineland mystic I’d like to include is psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), who acknowledged the influence of Hildegard, Eckhart, and Nicholas of Cusa.
After the Protestant Reformation, the mystical path was largely mistrusted. Some would even say it was squelched because of Martin Luther’s (1483–1546) emphasis on the Bible as the only source of knowledge about God (sola Scriptura). Personal spiritual experience was considered unimportant and suspect. To be fair, Luther’s contributions led Christians to an early stage “rational” use of the Scriptures which was a necessary corrective to Catholic over-spiritualization. But within Luther’s own reformed tradition, profound mystics arose such as the German shoemaker Jacob Boehme (1575–1624) and the inventor Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772).
In the following centuries, German academic theology flourished, relying almost exclusively on post-Reformation rationalism. While theological study continues to be an immense gift to the world, one can easily get trapped inside of endless discussions about abstract ideas with little emphasis on experience or practice. In contrast, mystics honor the experience of the essential mystery and unknowability of God and invite us to do the same. [2]
Hildegard of Bingen: A Multi-Talented Mystic
I burn in the sun and the moon and the stars. The secret Life of Me breathes in the wind and holds all things together soulfully.
—Hildegard of Bingen, Book of Divine Works 1.1.2
CAC affiliate faculty member Carmen Acevedo Butcher describes the extraordinary life of Hildegard of Bingen:
Between the summer of 1098 and the autumn of 1179, a remarkable German woman lived eighty-one years at a time when half that long was considered a full life. The Über-multitasking Frau, this Benedictine nun founded two convents; organized the first-ever public preaching tours conducted by a woman; authored nearly four hundred bold letters to popes, emperors, abbesses, abbots, monks, nuns, and laypeople; worked as healer, naturalist, botanist, dietary specialist, and exorcist; composed daring music; crafted poetry with staying power; wrote the first surviving sung morality play; and spent decades writing three compelling theological works. Meet the incomparable Hildegard of Bingen. Her long resume is impressive in any age, but it pales when compared with her life, which she considered her best divine offering. [1]
Acevedo Butcher highlights Hildegard’s passion for music as a pathway to God:
A multi-faceted artist, Hildegard was not only an author and a talented visual designer, but a musician of note. Her allegiance to God through her music is one of the strongest refrains in her life. She believed music was necessary for salvation, because it was the best representation of the state of humanity before the Fall. If a person wanted to know what it felt like to be alive before the Fall, Hildegard believed holy music could take you there, as she writes in her famous letter to the Prelates of Mainz:
Music stirs our hearts and engages our souls in ways we can’t describe. When this happens, we are taken beyond our earthly banishment back to the divine melody Adam knew when he sang with the angels, when he was whole in God, before his exile. In fact, before Adam refused God’s fragrant flower of obedience, his voice was the best on earth, because he was made by God’s green thumb, who is the Holy Spirit. And if Adam had never lost the harmony God first gave him, the mortal fragilities that we all possess today could never have survived hearing the booming resonance of that original voice. [2]
Hildegard’s songs often praised God’s presence in creation:
O Holy Power who forged the Way for us!
You penetrate all in heaven and earth and even down below.
You’re everything in One.
Through You, clouds billow and roll and winds fly!
Seeds drip juice,
springs bubble into brooks, and
spring’s refreshing greens flow—through You—over all the earth!
You also lead my spirit into Fullness.
Holy Power, blow wisdom in my soul and—with your wisdom—Joy! [3]
Mystical Union in Times of Crisis
| MARK LONGHURSTFEB 23 |
| from CAC editor Mark Longhurst |
The crises of our time demand that our spiritualities no longer navel gaze. That’s the criticism, at least, of contemplation. How can we pray when authoritarian leaders grow in power, when they scapegoat immigrants and transgender people, and when the earth burns from fossil fuels? How can we pray when genocide and ethnic cleansing take place? To me, the question is: How can we not pray in times like these? The true mystics are not those who retreat from the world but who find union with it. Such people are the ones whose intimacy with God and Life itself is such that their eyes are wide open to reality and their hearts necessarily break with those who suffer.
People who chronicle the mystical life often use language of “union” to describe what they’ve only glimpsed. Evelyn Underhill says mysticism is “the art of union with Reality.” There’s even a long tradition in Christian tradition of so-called “spousal mysticism.” Sixteenth-century Spanish mystics like John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila found such delight in divine love that only ecstatic exclamations of erotic, marital union could approximate their experience. Mystics from early Christianity onwards read the erotic poetry of the Hebrew Bible (yes, it’s in there!) and applied it to the soul and God: “I am my beloved and he is mine,” says the poetic voice of the Song of Songs (6:3).
But anyone who cares about the world, or even their neighborhood, today is painfully aware how far we are from union. Our cultural, political, and moral landscapes are filled with wounded division, the grossest abuses of power, groupthink, vitriol, scapegoating, and attribution of evil to the other. It’s almost enough to give up on unity. What can the mystical vision possibly offer such a world? How can there be true oneness without justice for all, especially for those who suffer most? And if we take sides, say, with the poor or immigrant person, or the incarcerated person, or the transgender person, does that mean we are giving up on oneness because certain other neighbors will be upset? If we are concerned about what’s happening to democracy in the United States, and stand against the President’s assault on longstanding legal norms, we are necessarily generating conflict, indeed a type of division rather than oneness, with the way things are. What’s a compassionate, everyday mystic to do?
I once heard speaker and author Brian McLaren talk about three stages towards union, or “unitive consciousness.” First, he said, there is naïve oneness, followed by duality, which eventually gives way to a more mature and heterogeneous oneness. Naïve oneness, on the positive and innocent side, is the undifferentiated union of mother and baby in utero. But out of the womb, naïve oneness often takes a harmful turn: it’s the narcissistic claim of the white, privileged person doing yogic breathing and heralding “oneness with the universe”—but while spinning COVID misinformation and demonstrating no awareness of systemic racism.
Bible readers will recall the desired “one language” of the builders of Babel’s tower, the imperial claim of powers to make the world in their image: “Look they are one people, and they all have one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do” (Genesis 11:6). Instead of a oneness that values diversity, naïve oneness is the ego doing the self-preservation that the ego usually does. When naïve oneness meets institutional power and privilege, it clings to it at all costs.
Duality and separation are a fact and not negative in themselves. We order our lives by binaries. For instance, I’m grateful for the code that wrote the program to build the computer on which I’m typing this post. I drove to the library today and made a binary, either-or choice to stop at the stop light when it turned red instead of crashing into the oncoming car. We necessarily differentiate from our parents in order to become our individual, adult selves. We are constantly choosing “this” and not “that,” and that’s good.
The holy and ordinary mystic knows how to operate in a world of binaries but also sees that reality is always more than two. A consciousness that has moved beyond dualism understands and participates in a wide and inclusive reality beyond Black/white, male/female, LGBTQ+/straight, Christian/non-Christian, citizen/undocumented immigrant. Compassionate wholeness holds a consciousness that is more than dual or what some writers call non-dual.
But just what is such a nondual or “unitive” consciousness? It’s far easier to name what it’s not than to articulate what it is, but you know it when you see it. The elderly person with a unitive heart who has nothing to prove, shines authentic joy, and speaks with just as much sparkle to children as to adults. The person who awakens the passion of being alive within you and makes you laugh more than you thought possible. Union is when I hunker down by my local brook and the incessant gurgle and flow of water cracks open something spacious inside me. Nondual or “unitive” consciousness is the elusive oneness that emerges only after learning from and even loving duality and difference.
First-stage, naïve “oneness” is really another word for domination and homogeny. When white people in the United States nurse resentments and grievances against “those” people, it festers into white nationalism and supremacy. It is “oneness” only for the few. Mega-corporations who sell the world their products may seem to be bringing people together but the brand façade often hides the injustice of Babel all over again. The world uses Google to search the internet and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram to share their lives—but whatever nondual consciousness is, it is more than digital non-intimacy and a platform for oligarchy. Instead of homogeneity and echo-chamber scrolling, unitive consciousness is, paradoxically, an oneness that includes difference. It is the spacious ability to honor multiple truths and identities without falling prey to the postmodern trap that would have us believe that multiple truths and identities are all there is.
Jesus lays claim to a spiritual fact of unity when he says, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30) and then prays “that they may all be one” (John 17:21). But Jesus also shows in his life and ministry that the oneness he experiences with the Father is anything but naïve. The oneness he experiences with the divine is the same oneness that he enacts with everyone around him—whether eating with tax collectors, healing lepers, hanging with the poor, or delivering the demon-possessed. “You will always have the poor with you,” he tells his followers (John 12:8), not because he is insensitive to the pain of poverty, but because Jesus followers are the ones who are united with those who suffer.
The mature mystic understands that the excluded can form a cast of saints rather than a deviation from the binary code. The degree of solidarity we demonstrate with people who suffer mirrors the degree of growth in true unity.
This is an adapted excerpt from my book The Holy Ordinary. If you haven’t read it yet, I hope it might be a resource for you to discover divine depths, even in these times.
