Medieval mystics and twenty first century secularists – different ways of trying to be good.

Four outstanding English mystics wrote in the fourteenth century, three in English and one in Latin, translated early in the next century; another has been added with her own day in the calendar of worship but she is  more questionably a mystic. One was a hermit, another, an Augustinian canon who had been a hermit for a time, the third, whose name is unknown, reveals himself as a priest in the last sentence of his work, the fourth was an anchoress and the questionable fifth, married, a business woman and a traveller who could be practical and kind. On occasion she spent time in a way the twenty-first century would approve – caring for a sick and verminous old woman in Rome, comforting a woman with post-natal depression from which she had suffered herself, asking her confessor for permission to kiss lepers (he gave it for kissing women but not men) and looking after her husband in old age when he was senile and incontinent.

Hermits were always male. They could roam the world, sometimes performing useful solitary jobs such as lighthouse keeping, usually blessed and licensed by bishops. Augustinian canons lived in communities under a rule. Anchoresses were enclosed in a grim service at which a Requiem Eucharist might be sung, signifying their death to sin. ‘What is her anchor-house but her grave?’ as The Ancrene Wisse put it.

This guide, The Ancrene Wisse, was written in the thirteenth century by a secular priest for three well-born women. Reality was not as bad as the quotation above sounds. Mother Julian had two servants and a walled-in garden as well as a window on the world. She was a known beneficiary of three wills. The rule includes guidance for the anchoresses’ servants as well as for themselves. Vocations were appropriate for the well-born and well-endowed, subsequently living on charity and unable to give alms because, as the author explained, they have nothing with which to be open-handed. There were luxuries: the writer found it necessary to specify that anchoresses were allowed no animals except cats - presumably to deal with the problem of mice. The weakness of women for pets is well-known and proved difficult to circumvent; Chaucer’s Prioress and her spoilt dogs flourished in the fourteenth century.

Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing were highly individual in their approach to their common subject and sometimes critical of each other. There was no English school of mysticism but one matter on which they were agreed was the superiority of the contemplative to the active life, very different from twentieth-first century thinkers. Practical charity to-day is, thankfully, rife in this country: food banks, drop-in centres for the homeless, prison visiting, funds for all manner of good causes; contemplative life, even attendance at churches, is at an all-time low. At the same time mental illness and depression are apparently on the increase. They used to be known as spiritual hunger.

The second half of the fourteenth century, the time when these mystics were writing, saw four outbreaks of the plague in England: the population may have been reduced by as much as fifty percent. Infection was understood and efforts were made to prevent people moving away from affected areas but there was no question of closing churches. Such a thing would have been unthinkable. In the recent pandemic of the twenty-first century, when the death toll was nothing like so serious, there was scarcely a murmur of protest when the closing of churches took place.

Other sources of disquiet at the time included the Hundred Years War with France, social unrest culminating in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and the Babylonish Captivity of the Papacy in Avignon yet the mystics were able to concentrate on what to them seemed to be of supreme importance – the desirability of the contemplative life. They put it variously but this was a subject common to all of them.

They were also all, to a greater or lesser degree, suspicious of the use of the intellect. Mystics live and look while scholars guess and argue. Rolle put it trenchantly: your theologian with his useless studying ought to be called not ‘Doctor’ but ‘Fool’. He condemned futile discussion and unbridled curiosity. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing maintained that God was unknowable to the intellect but knowable to love. Hilton allowed reading the scriptures and good books but more importantly meditation, prayer and devotion.

The author of The Cloud, who described his work as a Book on Contemplation, admitting that it was a life which may not suit everybody, used the story of Mary and Martha to illustrate the problem of actives and contemplatives in the world. He was fair to Martha, to her ‘busy-ness,’ ‘a good and holy business … the first part of the active life’ but resolute that nothing on earth would or should move Mary from the path she had chosen. Martha and others thinking like her might be excused for their ignorance of ‘the best part’ which her sister had chosen. The Ancrene Wisse author had put it bluntly; Martha’s work was to feed and clothe the poor as the lady of the house should, Mary should not meddle with such things.  In our own day Martha has many champions.

Walter Hilton in The Scale of Perfection was convinced that the gift of contemplation is not widespread and only available to the solitary. He was writing for a spiritual sister in Christ, an anchoress, physically cut off from society; he said she should look at herself as if only she and God existed in the world.  He regarded physical experience, the real warmth so feelingly described by Rolle, with suspicion; it may be good or evil and    not the best and not to be greatly desired. Julian of Norwich, writing some years after Rolle and Hilton recognised the possibility of seeing, feeling, hearing, smelling and tasting God.    

Hilton admitted that people in the world face temptations and trials from which his anchoress would be saved and that many people in the world might prefer to serve God as she does without having to earn a living. He is the only one of these four mystics to acknowledge the debt of the contemplatives to the actives who made a substantial contribution to their maintenance. This was  in exchange for the spiritual good presumed to derive from their local presence – Winchester, for example, supported six recluses and London, eight, in the middle of the thirteenth century.   

Richard Rolle, author of The Fire of Love, was certain that not doers but lovers of God will be rewarded with a heavenly crown. A man is not more holy or excellent because of the outward deeds he performs; God looks on the heart rather than the deed. Boredom and sloth are dangers to be fought by useful work, praying, reading or meditating – to be distinguished from studying or the intellectual life of the theologian for which Rolle had no time. No temperament should be less slothful than the mystic; the quiet to which they must school themselves was often their hardest task.

Rolle does admit that if anyone could achieve an active and contemplative life at one and the same time he would be great indeed but he does not think this possible. Lesser saints, in his opinion, are more suited to everyday business, including ecclesiastical office, than great ones; those who live in quiet are superior to those who busy themselves in the world. He has his own day in the calendar – 20 January. Hilton’s day is 24 March.

In May 1373 Mother Julian, aged thirty, was dangerously ill; she was living in her mother’s house and the parish priest came to give her the last rites. In fact she recovered and lived  into her seventies, becoming an anchoress and writing two versions of the sixteen ‘showings’ or revelations she received over a day and a night during the time of her sickness, establishing once and for all the goodness and love of God for His creation. She was not concerned specifically to compare the contemplative and the active life but to describe her own experience and to share it with her readers; ‘the vision was for all and sundry’. She described her own life with its five activities: rejoicing, mourning, longing, fearing and confident hoping, Of course she also had her window on the world and opportunities to give spiritual advice to others as in her recorded meeting with Margery Kempe in 1413. Her day is celebrated on 8 May, the anniversary of her visions.            

The ‘showings’ included details of Christ’s Passion, the fact that the devil was conquered through it, a revelation of the Virgin Mary, the recurring experience of delight and depression and the assertion that we shall eventually be taken from all our sufferings into joy and bliss. Mother Julian was often in need of reassurance when she subsequently became an anchorite. Christ frequently needed to tell her that all will be well; on five occasions in the Revelations she recorded him as doing so. He showed her ‘a little thing, the size of a hazel nut’, (a traditional measure of quantity in medieval recipes), the world as God made it, as God loves it and as God sustains it; everything owes its existence to the love of God. Thus she was taught, as she said, by God’s grace to believe that everything would turn out alright in the end as Jesus had promised.

Walter Hilton had written strictly in the 1380s of the duties of an anchoress to those who came to her for guidance and help. She was not to grudge time spent in answering these demands as time she might have spent in private prayer. Margery Kempe has left a description of the days she and Mother Julian spent together in 1413 when they were respectively about forty and seventy-one years old.

Margery could not read or write; she dictated her autobiography to two different scribes when she was in her sixties. It is not written in chronological order but written ‘as the matter came to this creature’s mind’ (this creature was Margery’s way of referring to herself). She was married at the age of twenty and bore her husband fourteen children. They are scarcely referred to except on one occasion when she asked God who would look after her coming child; He said that He would. She was in her time a lover of fine clothes, a not very successful business woman and all her life a keen traveller throughout England and in the Holy Land, Italy, Spain and Norway. Her ‘gift of tears’, constant ostentatious weeping, aggravated her fellow travellers and pilgrims. She had clearly little time for contemplation.

 The revelations which Margery wanted to discuss with Julian had happened many years before but she said that she needed to find out from the anchoress ‘if there was any deception in them’. She was not a fool and had heard that the anchoress could give good advice about such things. Margery had seen herself as a servant to St. Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary, during her pregnancy, and subsequently to the Virgin herself at the time of Our Lord’s birth, the visit of the three kings and the flight into Egypt. At another time she was present at the crucifixion, trying to comfort the Virgin. There is something essentially feminine and practical in these visions, a desire to help. They are different from Julian’s ‘showings’ but both Julian and Margery made use of the word ‘homely’ in discussing the relationship of Jesus with his followers and with themselves. They wrote of Jesus ‘as truly Our Mother as Our Father’.

Feminists have made much of Margery since her whole book, previously known in short extracts, was discovered in 1934. She was recognised by some as a mystic and given her day in the calendar – 9 November – but her life at times accorded with twenty-first century principles rather than withdrawal from the world. She must have been a very aggravating fellow pilgrim and fellow parishioner. Of the five people considered in this essay she is the nearest to to-day’s world but this does not necessarily make her the favourite. We can each choose that for ourselves.

Antonia Southern is a biographer and historian.