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ANIKÓ DARÓCZI
Then am I all the more distant [from God]
in so far as I have to speak,
and therefore I gently keep silent.
(Letter 28, 247-263)
In the last paragraph of the letter (263-270) Hadewijch describes her
consciousness now as ‘healed’, a consciousness that is no longer conditioned
or limited by the type of knowing that proceeds by making distinctions. In the
‘freedom of God’ she understood ‘all distinctions in a wholeness’. The ‘feasts’
of the introduction here become the ‘delight in the dwelling of the Lord’, and
this ‘dwelling’ could be understood as referring back both to the beginning
of Letter 28, and to the space formed, in Letter 22, by the coincidence of
the four dimensions. Here space turns into time, the ‘time of blessedness’,
in which ‘all the regions of the land’ were ‘flowing into the land’. There, then,
she remained ‘standing above everything and in the middle of everything’
and sees. Now, in these last sentences of the letter, it is not the magistra
commanding the disciple to open up her eyes in the clarity of God and see
herself in His light. The mystic herself shares her most intimate and highest
experience and insight — a memory of a state of consciousness — with the
one who can receive what she is saying: that in that time of the blessedness,
standing in the unfathomable space she was dwelling in, with her wholeness,
she did see the ‘gloriousness without end’.
In the following letters — the last three — Hadewijch seems to prepare
the ‘dear child’ to accept the fact that they might have to part. The reason
is unknown to us, but she mentions ‘wandering about in the country’, and
even imprisonment (Letter 29, 1-10). She first speaks comforting words with
the tenderness and strength of a mother: ‘Ah, dear child, your sadness hurts
me, and your dejection and your sorrow’. But soon in this tender voice we
also hear, as an overtone, that of the magistra from Letter 1: ‘I pray you, (...)
and admonish, and counsel and command like a mother her dear child’ — she
writes now (cf: Letter 1: ‘I: pray you and I admonish you and I demand of you
and I command you (...) that you open up the eyes of your heart in clarity and
regard yourself holy in God’). She asks the ‘dear child’ to dismiss the sorrow
from her because, ‘however it may be, it is the work of Love’. In the next
long letter Hadewijch once more elaborates on the essence of her mystical
teaching and her view on human failure to live in Love. In the last letter,
a short one, she informs the ‘dear child’ of a dream she had about her taking
over the role of magistra. She then exhorts her to the ‘most perfect freedom
of love’ and urges her to demand all those she can, ‘with strength, effort and
counsel’ to honour God (Letter 31, 30-33).
In this light we may interpret the modus mysticus — ‘inspired speaking to
inspired souls’ or ‘speaking with the soul’ — as offering entrance to a space
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Daréczi-Sepsi-Vassänyi_Initiation_155x240.indb 136 6 2020. 06.15. 11:04:17