Christ in the garden. She claims that she has already attained the requisite theological wisdom for the journey and that this wisdom will be her sole and soul- guide. I will drink for a while the unmingled wine!
But the soul is not to be dissuaded. OK, so why am I giving the SparkNotes version of a story that, to the average reader, might look like nothing more than a piece of 13 th -century Jesus fan fiction? Those who have heard of the Beguine author may have been surprised to see me characterize her in the opening paragraph as a theologian.
True, Mechthild probably did not know much Latin beyond the liturgy, meaning that even if she had access to theological and philosophical sources, she could not have read most of them without assistance. It might look to us today like a harlequin romance written for randy Christian noblewomen , but the fact that The Flowing Light was translated into both Latin and Middle High German and distributed throughout Germany and beyond indicates that her work was taken to have value for both scholastic and monastic readers.
In fact, the trope of the soul as female represented simultaneously as sister, mother, and bride of Christ was a symbolic with which devout men and women were invited to identify.
Like many female and quite a few male authors of the period, Mechthild repeatedly emphasizes the importance of humility and her own human wretchedness. But she also claims for herself religious authority , insofar as it is the Flowing Light of Godhead itself that speaks directly through her. One wonders what kinds of debates she might spark if she were writing today. In this sense, the female soul, through illumination and the demand for knowledge, becomes free of the restrictions imposed on her by the world in the secret chamber of the Divine.
