St Gertrude's Synecdoche:
The Problem of Writing the Sacred Heart
Eve B. Jenkins
St Gertrude was reluctant to acquiesce to the Lord's demand that she write
an account of her mystical experiences for others to read. "I thought
it so unseemly," she confesses, "to write down all these things that I could
not bring myself to listen to the voice of conscience and kept on putting it
off."1 Yet , fortunately, her Legatus memorialis
abundantiae divinae pietatis (The Herald of Divine Love in its usual English
rendering) was written despite her reservations, and has survived. How
did Gertrude manage to overcome her qualms? This paper proposes to explore
the way in which deployment of one central symbol, that of the sacred heart
of Christ, invests Gertrude with both the authority and the ability to write
in seemly fashion about God.
Gertrude was born in 1256 to unknown parents near modern Eisleben in eastern
Germany. At the age of five she was given as a child oblate to the convent
of Helfta, a thriving intellectual community which also included, as Gertrude
grew up, the well-known mystics Mechthild of Magdeburg and Mechthild of Hackeborn.
Gertrude was from childhood one of the community's most scholarly members, a
prodigy in Latin rhetoric, more an intellectual than a mystic until she underwent
a profound conversion experience at the age of twenty-five. After that,
though she continued to write prolifically (prayers, spiritual exercises, scriptural
exegesis), she began to receive regular holy visions which, being such private
dealings with God, she did not at first write down. When she finally made
up her mind to do so, eight years later, she produced what is now Book 2 of
the Legatus. (Books 1 and 3-5 were apparently compiled by other nuns at
Helfta, probably largely at Gertrude's instigation or dictation.) Book
2, on which I will focus for the purposes of this essay, is notable within the
history of Christian devotion because its vivid descriptions of Gertrude's visions
show a considerable elaboration on the long-standing but ill-defined veneration
of Christ's heart. This veneration was present somewhat in early Christianity,
in the belief that Christ's heart poured forth a redemptive fountain through
the wound in His side; that image was sustained by Anselm in the eleventh century
and became more pronounced and widespread in the twelfth, culminating in its
most famous articulation by St Bernard in his commentary on the Song of Songs.2
But it is the women of Helfta—Gertrude foremost, who surely knew Bernard's commentary,
and to a somewhat lesser extent the two Mechthilds—who make this devotion central
to their mystical visions. Caroline Walker Bynum calls theirs "an explicitly
eucharistic devotion,"3 in which the heart, which
is, obviously, of Christ's body and blood, both physical humanity and dispenser
of the Spirit, becomes the meeting place between human and divine. Gertrude
prays for such complete communion through Christ's heart in the seventh chapter
of the Exercitia (Gertrude's only other surviving work, a series of prayers
and exercises in pursuing the Christian life): "O heart that runs over
with loving-kindness! . . . O heart full of compassion! . . . O
dearest heart, I pray from my heart, absorb my heart totally in you."4
She often visualizes Christ's heart as pouring forth a stream of pure crystal
water (cf. Apoc. 22.1) which unites her to Him: "you will never be far
from me, as is shown you in this stream" (Legatus 2.9).
Yet to experience mystical union with and through the heart of Christ
is something entirely different than to express it in words. I have already
noted Gertrude's hesitation in making the radical translation. Students
of women's mysticism in the Middle Ages will appreciate the two most obvious
obstacles to a literary endeavor of this sort. For one thing, the ever-present
Pseudo-Dionysian problem endures, the sheer unthinkability of rendering divine
things in our impossibly makeshift human languages.5
For another, Gertrude (many would sympathetically lament) had the misfortune
of being born a woman in a period when women were rarely taken seriously as
scholars or theologians, when women's authority as writers was automatically
considered suspect. After all, many women writing at the time found it
necessary to include self-effacing apologies for their sex: Helfta's Mechthild
of Magdeburg finds her authority lacking in comparison to a "learned religious
man," asking God "How can one believe that you built a golden house in a filthy
slough?"6 and even the eminently learned Hildegard
von Bingen calls herself a "paupercula" and "indocta mulier."7 However,
any assertion that Gertrude's own reluctance stemmed in part from her sex must
remain conjectural; at no juncture does Gertrude herself retreat rhetorically
into being "only a little woman." While her humility and sense of unworthiness
are indeed manifest, they are not explicitly gender-linked.8
What is more central to Gertrude's anxiety is the first problem, the fundamental
human problem of communicating the divine: "I began to consider within
myself how difficult, not to say impossible, it would be for me to find the
right expressions and words for all the things that were said to me, so as to
make them intelligible on a human level, without danger of scandal" (Legatus
2.10). As Emilie Zum Brunn and Georgette Epiney-Burgard argue in the introduction
to their anthology Women Mystics in Medieval Europe, although negative theology
tends today to be thought of as a purely intellectual and not an affective pursuit
(having "deteriorated into scholastic metaphysics"), affective mysticism such
as that of Marguerite Porete, Meister Eckhart, and Hadewijch of Brabant does
demonstrate considerable concern with problems of language and representation.9
One has only to glance at Marguerite for ample evidence, a writer whose Soul
asserts that "everything one can say or write about God, or think about Him,
God who is greater than what is ever said, is thus more like lying than speaking
the truth."10 Likewise, Hadewijch strongly
links even her erotic and apparently bodily piety to unspeakability: "my
mind was beset so fearfully and so painfully by desirous love that all my separate
limbs threatened to break, and all my separate veins were in travail.
The longing in which I then was cannot be expressed by any language or any person
I know."11 Gertrude herself confesses of
her spiritual experiences:
[E]ven if my tongue were to stammer out something from [the paradise of union],
I who have been admitted, favored by divine goodness, if only by way of my own
vices and negligences, as though all covered with a thick crust, I should never
really be able to grasp any of it. Although the knowledge of angels and
human beings were to be worthily combined, even that would not suffice to form
one single word that might accurately express even a shadow of such sovereign
excellence. (Legatus 2.8)
It is important, therefore, to remember that, in the context of fundamental
divine unspeakability, the popular feminist problem of "writing the body" becomes
first and foremost the much thornier issue of writing God's body, via experiences
of Christ, and only secondarily the problem of writing the mystic's own body;
the writer's body, through imitatio Christi, becomes yet another text in which
to try to read Christ.12 Gertrude's essential challenge,
in first hesitating and then attempting to claim her authority by writing, is
not so much to validate her own personal bodily experience as to validate the
capacity of her bodily language to transmit ineffable truths about the nature
and power of God. Furthermore, her choices of imagery render that capacity
manifestly in need of validation. Gertrude, and her readers likewise,
cannot but be aware that, by forefronting Christ's heart in her devotions, she
has made a most audacious synecdoche: the representation of the Divine
by a body part.
That the heart is, in one sense, a merely physical organ is recognized
by Gertrude when she tells God that "you have led me to know and consider the
interior of my heart which until then I had heeded as little, if I may put it
thus, as the interior of my feet" (Legatus 2.2). The conscious absurdity
of her comparison suggests both that for the heedless human the heart is a common
body part like any other, and that, when illumined by God, it can potentially
be more than this. But the heart, disturbingly juxtaposed here with the
lowly feet, becomes specifically troubling, potentially "unseemly," when used
as a figure for divinity. If God cannot be grasped in words, how can the
very concrete heart, of all things, be defended as a metaphor? And how
does Gertrude, who cannot escape from the concreteness of the human world, the
human body, human language, dare to write at all?
The answers, I believe, lie in Christ's heart itself, as represented by
Gertrude. Perhaps paradoxically, the figure of the sacred heart validates
its own self as both source and result of truthful words. One must bear
in mind, still, that the Heart is, according to Gertrude and others, where the
divine and human join; this is where Christ's physical humanity is also the
fountain of divine spirit; this is where the human heart and soul go to commune
with both divine body and spirit. Hence it seems that, provided translation
between the divine and human realms were possible, the eucharistic Heart/heart
would be the appropriate site for its occurrence. Gertrude's writings
show that the heart can house the unspeakable and speak the inarticulable.
She at one point describes God as "all truth, clearer than all light, yet hidden
deeper in our heart than any secret" (Legatus 2.1), and she praises the heart's
eloquence over that of the tongue:
Since my tongue is ineffective to express how, in this showing, you granted
me still more abundantly the abiding gift of your grace, may the affection of
my heart do so, and . . . may I learn to direct my gratitude effectively through
the affective movement of my heart toward your love. (Legatus 2.12)
Yet the heart is not only the communicator of wordless emotion, but also seems
to be the place, at times, where emotions are turned into words. The sentences
of introduction to Gertrude's first-person confessions state that "she wrote
the things which she had experienced in her heart in intimate converse with
the Beloved, in her own hand and in his praise, in the following words" (Legatus
2.1). Book 2 of the Legatus is thus initially introduced to us as a verbalization
of a heart-felt experience. Gertrude describes this process in more detail
later, after she has recounted her resistances to God's insistence that she
record her visions. God's answer to her objections about the impossibility
of adequate representation is the following: "I am going to hold you close
to my divine heart, so that by repeated inspiration my influence may act gradually
upon you, pleasantly and sweetly, just as much as you can bear" (Legatus 2.10).13
Gertrude's written visions as we have them, including the visions of the sacred
heart, are here represented as absorbed from the influence of that very divine
heart, "just as much as [she] could bear," that is, translated into terms manageable
to the human mind, not by Gertrude's own agency, but by God's—that is, by that
of his physical manifestation, the Heart. Thus the sacred heart as it
is written by Gertrude is already its translation of itself; but at least we
may trust the translation as having been produced by the original author, so
to speak, and the writing is made more "seemly" by virtue of its divine authority.
The Heart's responsibility for Gertrude's writing is further consolidated
by the suggestion that Christ's heart has written and is written directly on
her own heart and soul. This imprinting is accomplished in two ways.
First of all, Gertrude uses the conventional scriptural figure of the wax seal
to express the reformation of her soul by contact with God: "I saw my
soul, like wax melting in the heat of the fire (Ps. 21:14), being placed close
to the Lord's most sacred breast, as though to take the imprint of a seal (Song
8:6; Wisd. 9:10). . . . Thus it was sealed with the imprint of the resplendent
and ever tranquil Trinity" (Legatus 2.7). Secondly, Gertrude sees her
own heart as having been spiritually inscribed with Christ's five wounds (the
most significant of which, of course, is the wound in the side—the heart).
She finds a prayer in an unidentified book which reads, in part:
"Inscribe with your precious blood, most merciful Lord, your wounds on my heart,
that I may read in them both your sufferings and your love. May the memory
of your wounds ever remain in the hidden places of my heart, to stir up within
me your compassionate sorrow, so that the flame of your love may be enkindled
in me. Grant also that all creatures may become vile to me, and that you
may become the only sweetness of my heart." (Legatus 2.4)
And swiftly her prayer is answered: "I knew in my spirit that I had received
the stigmata of your adorable and venerable wounds interiorly in my heart, just
as though they had been made on the natural places of the body" (Legatus 2.4).
Hence Gertrude has been marked (twice) by signs of God; she has the truest writing
in her, which, "read," conveys Christ's sufferings and love.14
Paradoxically, the physical symbol and the writing, both ordinarily human rather
than divine constructions, lead in this unusual case to her renunciation of
creatures, to the transcendence of the physical, and are worthy of being her
"only sweetness." Clearly the writing by and on the heart contains a different
potential for spiritual validity than other writing.
Not only is the sacred heart responsible for generating true "writing"
internally, but it also becomes the vehicle through which God communicates his
authorization of the use of tangible signs generally. This is best illustrated
in Gertrude's long narration of the Lord's response to her complaint that she
had received no tangible confirmation, such as a handshake, of the "pact" made
between herself and God: