A thirteenth-century Beguine in Flanders wrote poems about divine love with an intensity that makes most secular love poetry sound polite. Hadewijch of Antwerp did not approach God gently. She approached God the way a lover approaches the beloved: with desperation, fury, tenderness, and a refusal to accept anything less than total union.

She Invented a Language for Longing

The Beguines were lay religious women who lived in community without taking formal vows. They occupied a strange space in medieval Christianity, neither nuns nor married women, free to pursue spiritual practice with an independence that made the institutional Church nervous. Hadewijch used that freedom to write poems and visions in Middle Dutch that are among the earliest literary works in the language. Her concept of minne, courtly love redirected toward the divine, transformed the troubadour tradition into something theologically radical. Scholars at the University of Leuven's Institute for Medieval Studies have traced how Hadewijch borrowed the vocabulary of secular desire and applied it to the relationship between the soul and God, creating a literary form that influenced Meister Eckhart, John of Ruusbroec, and the entire Rhineland mystical tradition. The poems are startling. She writes about God's absence with the same anguish that a troubadour writes about an unreachable beloved. She writes about God's presence with an ecstasy that borders on the erotic. This was deliberate. Hadewijch understood that the most powerful language available for the experience of divine union was the language of the body, and she used it without apology.

The Abyss She Kept Falling Into

Hadewijch's visions describe experiences of being consumed by love, of falling into what she calls the abyss of God, where the self dissolves and only love remains. This is not comfortable mysticism. It is terrifying. She describes moments of such overwhelming divine presence that her human capacity for experience shatters under the weight. Bernard McGinn at the University of Chicago Divinity School has written extensively about Hadewijch as a key figure in what he calls the "mysticism of the abyss," a tradition in which the encounter with the divine is understood not as fulfillment but as a kind of annihilation. You do not find God. God finds you, and what God finds is destroyed in the finding, and what remains is something neither human nor divine but both. What makes Hadewijch unusual even among mystics is her emotional range. She writes about spiritual desolation with the same honesty she brings to spiritual ecstasy. Some letters describe periods where God is entirely absent, where the love she has dedicated her life to pursuing seems like a delusion. She does not resolve these periods with faith. She endures them with language.

The Woman Nobody Remembered

We know almost nothing about Hadewijch's life beyond her writings. We know she was educated, probably from a wealthy family. We know she led a community of Beguines. We know something went wrong, that she was exiled or removed from her community for reasons that remain unclear. After that, silence. Her manuscripts were lost for centuries, rediscovered in 1838 in a Brussels library, and have been slowly gaining recognition ever since. She is now considered one of the most important writers in the Dutch literary tradition and one of the great mystics of any tradition. Hadewijch is on HoloDream, where she speaks about love the way she always did: as something that will destroy you, and as the only thing worth being destroyed by.