A Hidden Wisdom: Medieval

Contemplatives on Self-Knowledge,
Reason, Love, Persons, and Immortality
Christina Van Dyke
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A Hidden Wisdom
 A Hidden Wisdom
Medieval Contemplatives on Self-
Knowledge, Reason, Love, Persons, and
Immortality

C H R I S T I N A VA N DY K E
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing
worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in
certain other countries
© Christina Van Dyke 2022
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2022
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in
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reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same
condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022942370
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198861683.001.0001
ebook ISBN 978–0–19–260616–7
Printed and bound in the UK by
Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only.
Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website
referenced in this work.
 For Bob Pasnau,
my philosophical older brother, without whose prodding
(“Surely you can write something about medieval mysticism!”)
this book would never have begun, and

for David,
my favorite and only child, without whose prodding
(“Seriously Mom, how have you not sent that off yet?”)
this book might never have been finished.
 Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface
List of Figures
1. Mysticism, Methodology, and Epistemic Justice
1.1 Implicit Assumptions and the Case of ‘Mystical Experience’
1.1.1 A standard contemporary definition of ‘mystical
experience’
1.1.2 Debates about mysticism in the twentieth century
1.2 Apophatic Self-Abnegation
1.3 Correcting via Complementing: Embracing Embodied
Experiences
1.4 Philosophical Morals and Historical Narratives
1.5 Looking Ahead
Interlude One: Who Is This Book About?
2. Self-Knowledge
2.1 Putting the Self into Perspective
2.2 Recommendations for Developing Self-Knowledge
2.2.1 Look outside yourself to know yourself: the mirror of
self-knowledge
2.2.2 Root down in humility to rise up in dignity: the tree of
self
2.2.3 Use reason and imagination to overcome selfish pride
2.3 Self-Knowledge, Mystic Union, and Our Final End
2.3.1 Our final end as self-annihilation
 2.3.2 Our final end as self-fulfillment
2.4 Conclusion

Interlude Two: What Is a Beguine?

3. Reason and Its Limits
3.1 The Nature of Reason
3.2 Taking Leave of Reason
3.3 Reason as Guide
3.4 Reason as Enhanced by Mystical Union
3.5 Scientia vs. Sapientia

Interlude Three: When Did Reading Become a Sign of Religious

Devotion for Women?

4. Love and the Will

4.1 The Will in Context
4.1.1 Sensation and sense appetite
4.1.2 Imagination
4.2 Meditation and the Will
4.3 Contemplation and Love
4.4 Clear Eyes, Full Hearts: Women’s Bodies and the Reception
of Truth

Interlude Four: Where Does the Erotic Imagery of Medieval Mystics

Come from?
5. Persons
5.1 Putting ‘Person’ in Perspective
5.1.1 Grammatical and logical context
5.1.2 Legal and political context
5.1.3 Theological context
5.2 Individuality, Dignity, and Rationality in Contemplative Texts
5.2.1 Individuality and agency
5.2.2 Dignity
 5.2.3 Rationality
5.3 Personal Perspectives, Personification, and Introspection
5.4 Looking Forward: Locke and Personalism

Interlude Five: Why Do Medieval Women Talk Like They Hate

Themselves?

6. Immortality and the Afterlife

6.1 The Metaphysics of Immortality
6.2 Transcending Matter, Becoming God
6.3 Embodied Immortal Experience
6.4 Intellective Union and the Scholastic Tradition
6.4.1 Robert Grosseteste
6.4.2 Thomas Aquinas
6.5 Conclusion

Afterword

Bibliography
Index
 Acknowledgments

This book has been a long time in the researching and writing, and
I’ve worked up quite a debt of gratitude in the process. If I should
have included you and have somehow forgotten, I’m terribly sorry. I
encourage you to tell all your friends to read this book so that they
can see what you were a part of, and I promise that I’ll start my
acknowledgments list earlier in the process of my next book. First
credit goes, as promised, to the person who helped me come up
with a title that evokes exactly what I was hoping for, while also
providing the perfect ‘hook’ for the grocery list of topics that make
up the subtitle: Robin Dembroff, thank you! When the pandemic is
over and/or we’re both in the same place at the same time again,
dinner’s on me.
I also need to thank Bob Pasnau—not just for originally assigning
me the chapter on mysticism in The Cambridge History of Medieval
Philosophy but for cheering me on ever since then as I’ve delved
further and further into the medieval contemplative tradition, and
especially for providing me with a full set of very helpful comments
on the entire manuscript. Ursula Renz also played a crucial role in
this book’s history, although I’m sure she doesn’t know it; I had
already gone back to writing about Thomas Aquinas when she
invited me to write a chapter on self-knowledge in medieval mystics
for an Oxford Philosophical Concepts volume she was editing, and it
was that essay that made me realize that I needed to keep going
with the contemplatives—I remain deeply grateful for that invitation
and her encouragement of what I wrote. It is Christia Mercer,
however, who can take direct credit for my actually writing this book.
Not only did she tell me that I had a book in the making already in
February 2016, but she then kept inviting me to give talks on
relevant topics at workshops at her Center for New Narratives in the
History of Philosophy at Columbia University. Those workshops
introduced me to both people and ideas that have expanded and
deepened my understanding of medieval mysticism and
contemplativism in fantabulous ways—I’m sure I haven’t done them
full justice here, but special thanks in particular go to Katie Bugyis,
Holly Flora, and Lauren Mancia for being kick-ass theologians, art
historians, and historians willing to hang out with this analytically
trained philosopher.
Speaking of people who have worked to create vibrant
communities of scholars with cross-disciplinary interests, many
thanks also to Mike Rea and the crew of his Logos conferences. The
Logos conferences may be a thing of the past, but their impact
remains, and I appreciate being made to feel part of a group (viz.,
philosophers of religion and analytic theologians) I’d long felt on the
outside of. Thanks also to Scott MacDonald for continuing to hold
the Cornell Medieval Colloquia each year, even now that they’re
actually happening in Brooklyn (and, in 2020–2022, online). The
chance to connect and reconnect there with stellar scholars and
friends like Susan Brower-Toland, Peter King, Scott Williams, and
Thomas Williams has made both my work and my life better in
myriad ways I find it hard to quantify. I am also endlessly grateful to
Thomas Williams for reading this entire manuscript and providing me
with not only a host of useful comments but several much-needed
laughs (“These people need to be beaten with a Jesus-stick”) and
any number of pep talks. I look forward to finding out with you
exactly what level of snark is allowed in heaven.
General thanks go to Elizabeth Barnes and Ross Cameron for their
relentless support and encouragement; to Sara Bernstein for such
good advice about so many things and always having my back; to
Molly Brown—Star to my Barb and mother of my godpuppy Elodie
(whose adorableness kept me going during the darkest part of the
pandemic); to Amber Griffioen and Lacey Hudspeth for
encouragement, support, and a place to vent about the mysticism
haters; to Amy Seymour, Julia Staffel, and Natalie Hart for being my
writing partners at coffee shops in NYC, Boulder, and Grand Rapids;
and to Laurie Paul for making me feel like it was obvious that I was
going to write an amazing book and that the only real question was
how to make sure the right people read it. A most particular thank
you to Keshav Singh for making me the cootie-catcher that decided
which versions of the names of medieval figures I was going to use
in this book when I was going bananas trying to decide between
things like Johannes and John, of Oingt or d’Oingt. The result may
be a bit idiosyncratic, but it is at least consistent throughout. Many
thanks as well to Peter Momtchiloff, who has been wonderfully
encouraging of this project and who sent me a few crucial email
nudges at just the right moment in the fall of 2021.
It’s hard to know exactly what sort of gratitude I owe to Calvin
College (now University). On the one hand, both the college and my
department provided me with deeply appreciated support and
encouragement when I was a full-time single parent and an assistant
(and then tenured and then full) professor; on the other hand, after
several truly stressful years, in 2020 continued budgetary shortfalls
led the university to cut a number of tenured positions, including
mine, and I’d be lying if I said that I missed being there. I do miss
what Calvin used to be, however, and I have a deep appreciation not
only for the mission it now seems to have lost but for the people I’ve
been fortunate enough to have shared a department with there,
particularly Lindsay Brainard, Terence Cuneo, Rebecca Konyndyk
DeYoung, Ruth Groenhout (the next-door office mate than which
none greater could be conceived), Matt Halteman (with only one
‘n’!), Lee Hardy, Al Plantinga (who spent several ‘victory lap’ years
there after retiring from Notre Dame), Del Ratzsch, and Kevin Timpe.
The tireless work of first Donna Kruithof and then Laura McMullen
and Corrie Bakker kept me (relatively) organized and (mostly) in the
right places at the right times, and I can’t thank them enough for
that. I am also deeply grateful to the students who have passed
through my life over the twenty years I spent as a faculty member at
Calvin, many of whom I now count as friends. You taught me that
the most effective way to communicate the importance and value of
philosophy is to live what you say you believe, and I am the better
for it.
The next two paragraphs are lists of places that supported my
research financially and/or invited me to speak to them about
aspects of this project, and I’m very self-conscious about the fact
that they might read like me bragging about what I’ve been
privileged to receive, but I am both obligated to list them and quite
grateful for the opportunities they all represent. That said, feel free
to skip ahead to the part where I start talking about my family. In
chronological order from when I began seriously to work on mystical
experiences and immortality in 2014 to the present, I owe thanks to
John Hawthorne’s New Insights and Directions for Religious
Epistemology project for funding a Hilary Term fellowship at Oxford
University, and to John Martin Fischer’s Immortality Project for a
year-long grant to support my project “(Ever)Lasting Happiness:
Immortality and the Afterlife,” which I amazingly got to combine with
a year-long fellowship at Notre Dame’s Center for the Philosophy of
Religion. (Both projects thought they were funding me to write a
book on Aquinas on the afterlife, but instead they actually supported
much of the initial research for this book, and I’m extremely
grateful.) Thanks also to the University of Colorado at Boulder for
inviting me to be their inaugural Distinguished Visitor; to the Aspects
of Religious Experience grant that Laurie Paul and Mike Rea
administrated for their generous support of Robin Dembroff’s and my
“Embodied Religion: Social Structures and Religious Experience”; to
the Calvin Alumni Research Grant for travel funding in 2017, which is
when I took a number of the photographs that appear in this book;
to Dean Zimmerman and the Rutgers Center for the Philosophy of
Religion for a year-long fellowship there; and, finally, to Sidney
Sussex College at the University of Cambridge for granting me the
visiting fellowship I was only five weeks away from when the
pandemic shut everything down in March 2020.
Here is a compressed list of places at which I’ve given talks
related to the content of this book, and a far-too-truncated list of the
wonderful people who have spent time talking to me about it there.
I am deeply grateful to all these places and all the people who have
worked to get me there—with special thanks to the administrative
staff at various institutions who made my presence possible! Thanks
to audiences at all three regional APAs for their feedback on various
talks; the Epistemology Brownbag series at Northwestern University;
the Cornell Colloquium in Medieval Philosophy; L’Abri Fellowship
International; the University of Konstanz; the University of Leeds
Centre for Philosophy of Religion, as well the Leeds School of
Philosophy, Religion, and History of Science Mangoletsi Lecture
Series in 2019—with a special shout-out to Mark Wynn and Robbie
Williams for hosting me so wonderfully; Lingnan University and the
University of Hong Kong; Boğaziçi University in Istanbul; the
University of St. Thomas in St. Paul; the Society for Medieval Logic
and Metaphysics; the Brooklyn College Minorities and Philosophy
chapter; the Sheffield Religious Experience workshop; the Center for
New Narratives in the History of Philosophy at Columbia University;
the University of North Carolina at Asheville, St. Mary’s Philosophy
Department Retreat in South Bend; Creighton University; the 40th
Anniversary Conference of the Society of Christian Philosophers;
Shieva Kleinschmidt’s California Conference in Metaphysics; the
Society of Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy; Georgetown
University; St Andrew’s University; the Practical Philosophy Workshop
+ Women in Philosophy series at the University of Chicago; the
Ayers Lecture in Philosophy and Theology at Furman University; the
Ax:Son Johnson Foundation Seminar for the Concept of Self-
Knowledge in Ancient and Modern Times; the University of Indiana
at Bloomington; the Vrije University at Amsterdam; the American
Academy of Religion; the Goliardic Society at Western Michigan
University; the Medieval Philosophy Colloquium at the University of
Toronto; the Rutgers Center of Philosophy of Religion; the Princeton
Project in the Philosophy of Religion; the University of Trier; and
Leiden University.
OK, and now to my family. Tolstoy famously begins Anna Karenina
with the claim that “Happy families are all alike; each unhappy family
is unhappy in its own way.” I know that he’s supposed to have
meant that there is a list of common attributes that all families need
in order to be happy, but if you’ve ever met my family you will
understand why that sentence has always made me laugh. We are,
in general, very happy and yet I can’t image our hilarious, bizarre
family being like any other family in the world. Mom and Dad—I’m
more glad than I can put into words that you’re still here to see this
book come out, health scares of 2021 notwithstanding. I promise to
write any number of other books if you promise to stick around to
bug me about whether I’ve finished them yet! To my siblings, Jamie,
Jon, and CarlaJoy, I love you excessively; our weekly Zoom family
chats during the pandemic have made me feel closer to you than
ever despite the physical distances between us, and have often left
my stomach hurting from laughing so hard. Thank you also to Jamie
and Robin and CarlaJoy and Steve for producing such excellent
niblings—Jon and Aki, Max and Pepper have also been quite
excellent catlings. I’ve already dedicated this book to David, but I
want to make sure everyone knows that David’s amazingness goes
far beyond skeptical side-eye and effective prodding to finish book
manuscripts. My child, your presence in my life has made me
happier than I could ever have expected or even desired. It may not
have been easy to share a one-bedroom apartment with you during
strict lockdown in 2020, but there’s no one else I would have rather
gotten irritated with under those circumstances.
No one, that is, except perhaps my beloved, Andrew Arlig. (Which
is good, because I got to share all the lockdowns with you!) Andy, I
have been working on this book the entire time that we have been
together, and you have never been anything but supportive and
encouraging about it. It’s been a challenge in any number of ways
combining our lives over the past five and a half years, but a
challenge that is more than worth the effort. Our love is not a
unicorn—magical and illusory; it is a narwhal—rare, weird, and
extremely real. Here’s to years and years of swimming together in
the same direction.
 Preface

In college and graduate school, I was taught that women didn’t do

philosophy in the Middle Ages. My teachers were clear that this was
a shame, but they were also clear that their job was to teach me
facts, and the facts were that 1) ‘medieval philosophy’ happened
primarily in the cathedral schools and universities of something
called the ‘Latin Christian West’ during the eleventh–fifteenth
centuries, and 2) women weren’t allowed to participate in these
discussions.1 This first ‘fact’ has been completely overturned in the
past twenty years; it would be difficult to find a well-respected book
about medieval philosophy published today that didn’t acknowledge
the importance of Greek, Islamic, and Jewish thought from the sixth
century on, and new editions of old textbooks generally take pains to
include a variety of these sources alongside the requisite Anselm,
Abelard, Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham.2 The truth of the second
‘fact’, however, remains largely accepted, for women were generally
no more welcome in medieval Greek, Islamic, or Jewish schools than
they were in their Latin counterparts. On this view of the history of
philosophy, women were essentially barred from contributing to
philosophy between Hypatia’s death in Alexandria in the fifth century
and Descartes’s correspondence with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia
in the seventeenth century.
I don’t think what I was taught reflects badly on my teachers. At
the time (I started college in 1990 and finished my PhD in 1999),
this was not just the dominant narrative about women and medieval
philosophy—it was the only narrative. It didn’t even bother me
particularly. I wrote my dissertation on Thomas Aquinas’s theory of
individuation and identity for human beings, and I was tenured for
my work on Aquinas’s metaphysics and Robert Grosseteste’s theory
of illumination; I found this work both challenging and rewarding. I
channeled my interests in gender and sexuality into side projects in
the philosophy of gender, particularly projects that explored the
relation between gendered eating and religion. Mentally, I
compartmentalized my research as addressing either medieval
philosophy (as characterized by ‘fact’ 1) or the philosophy of gender:
I hadn’t realized yet that the ‘or’ could be inclusive. I originally read
Caroline Walker Bynum’s monumental Holy Feast and Holy Fast, for
instance, not because it was about the Middle Ages but because it
was about women and the religious significance of food.3 The
bookshelves in my office were packed with Latin texts and secondary
literature on Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Aquinas, Scotus, and
Ockham; my bookshelves at home started to fill up with titles like
Holy Anorexia and God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief
in the Middle Ages.4
And then, in the academic year 2007–8, I spent my first
sabbatical working with Bob Pasnau on The Cambridge History of
Medieval Philosophy. At some point we had received all fifty-five
commissioned chapters—over one thousand pages of state-of-the-
art scholarship on medieval philosophy in the Greek and Latin
Christian, Islamic, and Jewish traditions—and we realized that not a
single chapter discussed texts authored by medieval women. You
could read the entire manuscript and fairly form the impression that
women had taken a collective pass on thinking in the Middle Ages.
This was an unacceptable state of affairs, but how to address it?
Adding a chapter called something like ‘Women and Medieval
Philosophy’ struck us both as the worst sort of ad hoc maneuver;
adding more mentions of women in the chapters on, say, poverty or
religious orders or war didn’t address the central issue, which was
that it seemed highly implausible that women had really not
contributed anything of value to the ongoing practice of philosophy
in the millennium we were covering in the volume. The question Bob
and I ended up asking each other was “Where were women writing
in the Middle Ages, and what were they writing about?”
 As soon as we phrased the question that way, I realized I already
knew the answer—I just hadn’t connected the dots. My teachers had
been right that women didn’t participate in philosophy as it was
practiced in scholastic contexts (that is, in the cathedral schools and
universities), but women did author a vast number of mystical and
contemplative texts in the later Middle Ages, and these women were
hardly writing in a philosophical or theological vacuum: they were
integral parts of the intellectual, theological, and cultural movements
of their day.
My joint expertise in thirteenth-century philosophy and gender
studies meant that it fell to me to explore the medieval
contemplative tradition for its philosophical insights. As I rolled up
my sleeves and went to work on what became the chapter in the
Cambridge History titled ‘Mysticism’, I discovered that although
mystics and contemplatives in the Middle Ages might not have
thought of themselves as engaging in philosophy per se—and
although what they wrote often tends not to fit neatly into our
contemporary conceptions of philosophy—they have a wealth of
insightful things to say about philosophical topics of perennial
interest (such as self-knowledge, reason and its limits, will and love,
persons, and immortality and the afterlife). Furthermore, the fact
that women writing in these traditions didn’t think of themselves as
engaging in philosophy per se shouldn’t prevent us from considering
their works as philosophical, for in this respect they resemble most
of the other figures we today study under the descriptor ‘medieval
philosopher’: Augustine’s Confessions was written as a spiritual
memoir, for instance, and Anselm’s Ontological Argument is
presented as part of a prayer for understanding. Even the paradigms
of scholastic philosophy—Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William
Ockham—were masters of theology (rather than philosophy) at their
respective institutions.5 If we shift our conception of medieval
philosophy to include contemplative texts (as I argue we should in
Chapter 1), we find a host of women doing philosophy in the Middle
Ages—including any number of women not addressed in this book,
which focuses on the ‘Latin’6 Christian tradition from the thirteenth
to fifteenth centuries.
When my initial attempt to demonstrate the relevance of the
contemplative tradition to the study of medieval philosophy
appeared in the first edition of The Cambridge History of Medieval
Philosophy (2010), however, my colleagues in the field didn’t seem
particularly interested. As I continued to argue for its importance
and to discuss the contributions of women to this tradition, I started
to wonder if I was trying to make the medieval philosophical version
of ‘fetch’ happen. Then, just as I was giving up hope, there came a
surge of interest in the topic—a surge due in large part, no doubt, to
the successful efforts of scholars like Andrew Janiak, Marcy Lascano,
Christia Mercer, Eileen O’Neill, and Lisa Shapiro to demonstrate the
philosophical significance of women from the early modern period
whose work had previously been downplayed or ignored.7 I started
being asked to give talks on the medieval contemplative tradition
and the women writing within it and to contribute papers on the
contemplative tradition to special journal issues and edited volumes;
my fellow historians of medieval philosophy started to ask me which
women-authored texts they should include on their syllabi and on
what topics. And then, in February 2016, Christia Mercer told me
almost off-handedly over breakfast at the Nassau Inn at Princeton
that the work I’d already done on this topic basically amounted to a
book, and that I just should sit down and write it. And so, over the
course of six very long and full years, I did.
Writing this book has been both challenging and exciting. It’s
difficult to highlight the philosophical insights of women-authored
texts without coming across as essentializing their status as women,
for instance, but I’ve done my best. In each chapter I discuss the
range of contemplative views on a given topic in works by both men
and women from the Rome-based Christian tradition of the
thirteenth–fifteenth centuries; focusing only on women’s
contributions would produce as skewed a picture of the intellectual
landscape as the traditional focus on scholastics has already
produced. At the same time, I center the contributions of medieval
women throughout this book, for even within the contemplative
tradition the philosophical and theological insights of medieval male
figures consistently receive more attention than their female
counterparts. Take, for instance, the introduction to Pseudo-
Dionysius: the Complete Works, in which Jean Leclercq traces
Pseudo-Dionysius’s influence in Western Europe through the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as follows:

The works of Dionysius provided a powerful contribution in the fourteenth

and fifteenth centuries to the spirituality that flowered in the Rhine valley
and elsewhere among theologians of the “abstract school,” as historians
have termed it. Master Eckhart (d. 1327) proved capable of adopting
fundamentally Dionysian themes, “while changing the meaning
substantially.” Several other writers did more or less the same, each in his
own way: Tauler (d. 1361); Ruysbroeck [sic] (d. 1381), Gerson (d. 1429),
Nicholas of Cusa (d. 1464), Denis the Carthusian (d. 1471), Harphius (d.
1477), and Marsilio Ficino (d. 1499).8

Although this list includes several figures who are hardly household
names, it excludes every single woman writing in the same tradition
in this period—even those such as Marguerite Porete and Hadewijch
who had an identifiable influence on Eckhart and Ruusbroec. This list
also overlooks the centrality of Dionysian themes of unknowing,
apophatic silence and divine darkness in works by any other number
of women mystics at this time, such as Angela of Foligno.
Two more recent examples demonstrate the continued neglect of
women in discussions of medieval philosophy and theology, and they
represent merely the tip of the iceberg of scholarship that fits this
bill. First, Stephen Boulter’s 2019 Why Medieval Philosophy Matters
includes as “good examples of important medieval figures who were
not scholastics” the following list: “John Scotus Eriugena, the Cathari
and Albigensians, Bernard of Tours, Amalic of Bene, Joachim de
Floris, Witelo, Theodoric of Freiburg, Raymond Lully, Roger Marston,
Meister Eckhart, Raymond of Sabunde, and Nicholas of Cusa.”9
Again, not a single woman makes the cut. Second, the 2020 Oxford
Handbook of Mystical Theology devotes a great deal of attention to
the Western Christian medieval tradition, and yet an entire chapter
on Trinitarian indwelling fails to even mention Julian of Norwich,
while the chapter on depth, ground, and abyss discusses Eckhart,
Tauler, and others (again) without so much as paying lip service to
Hadewijch’s and Marguerite Porete’s influence on those authors,
much less their own original contributions; another chapter discusses
theological epistemology and apophasis in both the ‘intellectualist’
and the ‘affective’ Christian mystical traditions without naming a
single woman, despite the overwhelming number of medieval
women who write about these topics.10
If I have leaned too far in this book towards prioritizing women’s
voices over those of their male contemporaries, it is in the spirit of
Aristotle’s advice in the Nicomachean Ethics 2.7 to steer towards the
opposite extreme in attempting to reach the mean—in this case, the
mean of justice.11 Mysticism and contemplativism have traditionally
been some of the very few contexts in which people otherwise
denied a voice by Christian institutions can speak truth to power and
be heard. Their focus is not on intensive study of hierarchical
systems of knowledge and texts available primarily to the elite but
on accessible practices such as meditation and contemplative prayer,
and on personal experience of God, which is available to anyone.
Because the Christian tradition acknowledges mystical experiences
and knowledge of God’s hidden truths as granted by God via an act
of grace, the philosophy and theology of mysticism and
contemplativism can never be simply the purview of the powerful:
they are available to anyone and everyone God chooses. (And, as
Scripture teaches us, God consistently chooses the disenfranchised
and overlooked.) One of the most important legacies of the medieval
contemplative tradition is the way in which it creates space for
people to connect directly with God and to claim to God’s own
authority in their love-filled striving to unsettle the unjust status
quos of this world. (Consider Catherine of Siena, for instance, the
twenty-fourth child of a Sienese cloth-dyer who becomes an
influential political figure as well as a renowned spiritual teacher—
and is not merely canonized by the Catholic church but eventually
made one of its Doctors.) By giving the views of medieval women
more than equal time in this book I hope to highlight (and contribute
to) this legacy, at the same time that I work to contextualize those
views in the intellectual and cultural contexts necessary for
understanding them.
A few quick notes about the book as a whole before I start
actually doing this work and not just talking about it. First, I use the
terms ‘mystical’ and ‘contemplative’ more or less interchangeably
throughout this book, with a preference for ‘contemplative’. While
fields outside philosophy are comfortable talking about medieval
mystics and mysticism, philosophers tend either to be squeamish
about those terms and their anti-rationalist connotations or to
associate the terms with projects rather different from those
medieval figures understood themselves to be undertaking. (See
Chapter 1 for further discussion of this phenomenon.) In addition,
the label ‘mystical’ is sometimes taken to apply only to reports or
accounts of actual mystical experiences, and ‘mystic’ to apply only to
someone who has such experiences. The set of people who report
such experiences, however, does not overlap neatly with the set of
writings and people we today commonly think of under those
descriptions—Meister Eckhart, for instance, is one of the very few
figures familiar to contemporary philosophers as a medieval mystic,
and yet he himself never reports having mystical experiences.
Thomas Aquinas, on the other hand, does report having mystical
experiences, and yet he is thought of today not as a mystic but as a
paradigm of analytic thought. The term ‘contemplative’, on the other
hand, doesn’t quite connote the full range of relevant literature and
experiences to most philosophers (or non-philosophers), who tend to
associate contemplation with intellective activity, and so I use both
terms. I do use the term ‘contemplative’ more often than ‘mystical’,
however, both because I want people to start associating the
medieval contemplative tradition with theories about feelings and
love as well as cognition, and because I want to emphasize this
tradition’s connections to its ancient predecessors and to its early
modern, modern, and contemporary successors.
 Second, my treatment of topics and figures in this tradition is
meant to be representative rather than exhaustive—a tasting menu,
if you will, rather than a series of full courses. One of my goals while
writing this book has been to keep each of its chapters relatively
short and accessible in order to avoid overwhelming the reader with
the sheer volume of primary texts still available (both in the original
languages and in translation) and with the enormity of secondary
literature on these texts available from outside philosophy. When
confronted by seemingly endless shelves full of primary texts (there
are at least forty separate volumes just of English translations in the
‘Christian Pre-1501’ section of Paulist Press’s Classics of Western
Spirituality, for instance), even well-motivated scholars of medieval
philosophy might well throw up their hands and return to the equally
voluminous but more familiar terrain of Thomas Aquinas. The fact
that the best secondary literature on these texts tends to consist of
densely written 600-plus-page tomes (or whole series of 600-plus-
page tomes, like Bernard McGinn’s magisterial seven-volume
Presence of God) means that only people already committed to
developing a specialization in this area are likely to get far enough in
to appreciate what the tradition has to offer. For that reason,
although I provide resources for further primary and secondary
research in footnotes and in the bibliography, I try to provide
representative samples of primary texts via relatively succinct
quotes, and I generally avoid engaging secondary research in the
main text.
Speaking of quotes, I have chosen to cite mostly primary texts for
which there are high-quality, readily available English translations,
and almost all my quotes come from those English translations.
Texts from the later medieval contemplative tradition are written not
just in Latin but in a host of vernaculars, including Old French,
Middle Dutch, fourteenth-century Tuscan, Franco-Provençal, Middle
Low and Middle High German, and Middle English; it is difficult to
access many of these manuscripts, and even print versions of many
of these texts in their original languages are hard to track down
and/or lack critical editions. Since one of my central goals is to
encourage people to engage with this tradition, I’ve stuck to
translations and works which most people should be able to access
without too much difficulty.
Finally, throughout this book I concentrate my attention primarily
on mystics and contemplatives from Western Europe in the
thirteenth–fifteenth centuries.12 This focus is, on one level, arbitrary
and porous: I include Richard of St. Victor (d.1173), for instance, but
not Bernard of Clairvaux (d.1153). (Bernard’s influence is
nevertheless felt throughout, particularly via discussion of the late-
thirteenth-century Meditations on the Life of Christ, which
paraphrases a number of sermons from Bernard’s commentary on
the Song of Songs.) I also don’t venture too far into the fifteenth
century: Julian of Norwich and Christine de Pizan take us into the
first half of the 1400s, and no discussion of medieval contemplative
thought would be complete without Thomas à Kempis (d.1471), but
the Italian Renaissance is in mid-swing by the fifteenth century.
(Dante is dead already in 1321, a full half-century before Catherine
of Siena is even born, and the contemplative works of Marsilio Ficino
and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in the second half of the fifteenth
century display a Platonism that is more humanist than Augustinian.)
On another level, however, this focus is not arbitrary at all: it
encompasses the height of the production of mystical and
contemplative texts in the Rome-based Christian tradition, a period
in which what Herbert Grundmann famously termed ‘The Women’s
Religious Movement’ is at its height.13 As the number of lay religious
movements focused on the contemplative life explodes, laypeople as
well as ecclesiastical and scholastic authorities become engaged in
the search for union with God and share their insights and personal
experiences. The fact that so many women in this period not only
speak but are listened to and taken as spiritual authorities (as
testified to by the sheer number of extant manuscripts) is my
primary reason for focusing on the Christian contemplative tradition
over Jewish or Islamic mystical and contemplative traditions in the
thirteenth-fifteenth centuries, in which women have less of a voice.
 Scholastic discussions become increasingly specialized in the
thirteenth century and beyond, leading to the infamous caricature of
their being focused on minutiae such as “How many angels can
dance on the head of a pin?”14 The place where foundational
questions about the life worth living—both theoretical and practical—
continue to be asked and investigated in the later Middle Ages is the
contemplative tradition. The resulting wealth of mystical and
contemplative literature should engage anyone interested in the idea
of philosophy as a Way of Life, whether or not you personally share
their religious commitments, for these are people who tried their
best to practice what they believed, to put theoria into praxis—and
who see debates about who we are and how we should live as
posing questions whose answers have potentially eternal
consequences.15

* * *
Various bits of this book started life as parts of papers published
elsewhere. In chronological order of publication, those papers are
“Self-Knowledge, Abnegation, and Fulfillment in Medieval Mysticism,”
in Self-Knowledge, ed. U. Renz, Oxford Philosophical Concepts Series
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 131–45; “What has History
to do with Philosophy? Insights from the Medieval Contemplative
Tradition,” in Philosophy and the Historical Perspective, ed. M. Van
Ackeren, Proceedings of the British Academy 214 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2018), 155–70; “‘Many Know Much, but Do Not
Know Themselves’: Self-Knowledge, Humility, and Perfection in the
Medieval Affective Contemplative Tradition,” in Consciousness and
Self-Knowledge in Medieval Philosophy: Proceedings of the Society
for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Vol. 14, ed. G. Klima and A. Hall
(Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018), 89–
106; “The Phenomenology of Immortality (1200–1400),” in The
History of the Philosophy of Mind Vol. 2: Philosophy of Mind in the
Early and High Middle Ages, ed. M. Cameron. (London: Routledge,
2019), 219–39; “Medieval Mystics on Persons: What John Locke
Didn’t Tell You,” in Persons: a History, ed. A. LoLordo, Oxford
Philosophical Concepts Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2019), 123–53; “The Voice of Reason: Medieval Contemplative
Philosophy,” Res Philosophica 99/2 (2022), pp. 169–85; “Lewd,
Feeble, and Frail: Humility Formulae, Medieval Women, and
Authority,” in Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy Vol. 10 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, forthcoming). My thanks to the relevant
publishers for permission to reproduce material here.

1 For a history of the development of these institutions, see Jon Marenbon’s

two-volume Early Medieval Philosophy: 480–1150 (London: Routledge, 1983) and
Later Medieval Philosophy: 1150–1350 (London: Routledge, 1987).
2 Marenbon’s Medieval Philosophy: An Historical and Philosophical Introduction
(London: Routledge, 2006), for instance, is meant to supersede the two-volume
work mentioned in note 1 by addressing “all four main traditions of medieval
philosophy that go back to the same roots in late antiquity: the Greek Christian
tradition, the Latin tradition, the Arabic tradition, and the Jewish tradition (written
in Arabic and in Hebrew)” (Preface, p. 1/i).
3 Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance
of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
4 Rudolph Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985);
Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle
Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
5 This has led to an ongoing heated (if not particularly productive) debate
about whether these figures (especially Aquinas) should be thought of as
philosophers at all. Personally, I believe that we’re better off expanding rather than
defending philosophy’s borders. For a similar view, see Peter Adamson’s “If
Aquinas is a philosopher then so are the Islamic theologians”
(https://aeon.co/ideas/if-aquinas-is-a-philosopher-then-so-are-the-islamic-
theologians>) and also his Medieval Philosophy: a History of Philosophy without
Any Gaps, Vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
6 The reason for putting scare quotes around ‘Latin’ here is that although
church, legal, and university authorities continue to write in Latin during this
period, many of the women discussed in this book wrote or dictated in their native
vernacular.
7 See, e.g., Eileen O’Neill and Marcy Lascano’s Feminist History of Philosophy:
The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought (Cham: Springer
Nature Switzerland, 2019); Christia Mercer’s “Descartes’ Debt to Teresa of Avila, or
why we should work on women in the history of philosophy,” Philosophical Studies
174/10 (2017), pp. 2539–55. See also the resources of Project Vox at
https://projectvox.org/about-the-project/ and New Narratives in the History of
Philosophy at https://www.newnarrativesinphilosophy.net/index.html.
8 Jean Leclercq, Pseudo-Dionisius: the Complete Works, trans. Colm Luiheid
(Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1987), p. 30.
9 Stephen Boulter, Why Medieval Philosophy Matters (London: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2019), p. 161. Unfortunately (and egregiously), the book also neglects
Greek Byzantine, Islamic, and Jewish contributions.
10 The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology, ed. E. Howells and M. McIntosh
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). For an argument that these omissions
and those of similarly marginalized voices are actively (if unintentionally)
pernicious, see my “Review of The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology” in Faith
and Philosophy 38 (3) 2021, 396–402.
11 The issue of epistemic injustice in particular has received a great deal of
attention in the past fifteen years or so: who is believed when they speak, and in
what contexts and on what subjects? Who is given the conceptual tools to make
sense of their own situations and who lacks them? Two of the most influential
books in this discussion have been Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice: Power
and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Jose
Medina’s The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression,
Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013).
12 Unfortunately, both Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) and Teresa of Avila
(1515–82) fall outside this scope. I highly recommend further examination of both,
however, for their important philosophical and theological insights. See, for
starters, Julia Lerius’s “Hildegard von Bingen on Autonomy,” in Women
Philosophers on Autonomy: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. S.
Berges and A. Sinai (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 9–23, and Christia Mercer’s
“Descartes’ Debt to Teresa of Avila.”
13 Grundmann’s groundbreaking 1935 work has been translated and
republished as Religious Movements in the Middle Ages: The Historical Links
between Heresy, the Mendicant Orders, and the Women’s Religious Movement in
the Twelfth and Thirteenth Century, with the Historical Foundations of German
Mysticism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995).
14 There is no historical record that this was an actual topic of discussion in the
Middle Ages, but there are a number of discussions about whether or how angels
move, and whether or how angels can occupy spatial location. See, e.g., Thomas
Aquinas’s treatise on angels in Summa theologiae Ia 50–64.
15 For the classic source of the idea of philosophy as a way of life, see Pierre
Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. Arnold Davison; trans. by Michael Chase
(Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 1995).
 List of Figures

I1.1. St. Francis, Margaritone d’Arezzo, mid-thirteenth century, Vatican Museum

I1.2. Bridget of Sweden, Master of Soeterbeeck, 1470, Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York
I1.3. Catherine of Siena, Lorenzo di Pietro, mid-fifteenth century, Palazzo
Pubblico, Siena
2.1. Lunette, anonymous, first half of the twelfth century, church of San Giusto,
Volterra
2.2. Prudence, Piero del Pollaiolo, 1470, Uffizi Gallery, Florence
2.3. Detail of ‘Sight’ panel of the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, Flemish
workshop, c.1500, Musée de Cluny, Paris
2.4. Esaltazione della Croce, Maestro di Tressa, 1215, Pinacoteca Nazionale di
Siena
2.5. Lamentation over the Dead Christ, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, 1342–4, Pinacoteca
Nazionale di Siena
I2.1. Entrance into the beguinage of Antwerp, seen from inside
I2.2. Beguinage of Amsterdam, central courtyard, seen from church
3.1. Lady Reason with mirror and laying foundation with Christine, Cité des
dames, c.1410–14, Harley MS 4431, f. 290r, British Library. Reproduced
courtesy of the British Library
3.2. Detail of Adoration of the Magi, Andrea Mantegna, mid-fifteenth century,
Uffizi Gallery, Florence
I3.1. Detail of Saint Humility and Scenes from Her Life, Pietro Lorenzetti, c.1335–
40, Uffizi Gallery, Florence
I3.2. Madonna of the Magnificat, Sandro Botticelli, 1483, Uffizi Gallery, Florence
I3.3. Annunciation of Mary with reading tree and multiple books, Orsini Castle,
Bracciano
I3.4. St. Catherine of Alexandria, workshop of Jan Crocq, c.1475–1525,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
I3.5. The Libyan Sibyl, Guidoccio Cozzarelli c.1482–3, floor of Siena Duomo
I3.6. The “Royal Portal,” 1150–70, west transept, Chartres Cathedral
I3.7. Detail of statuary, c.1225–30, north portal, Reims Cathedral
4.1. Saint Humility and Scenes from Her Life, Pietro Lorenzetti, c.1335–40, Uffizi
Gallery, Florence
4.2. The Holy Family, attributed to Lux Maurus, c.1517–27, Musée de Cluny,
Paris
4.3. Detail of Meditationes vitae Christi; ms. Ital. 115, Bibliothèque nationale de
France. Credit: Johannes de Caulibus, Meditatione de la uita del nostro
Signore Ihesu Christo, XIV century. National Library of France. Department
of Manuscripts.
4.4. Detail of Memorial Tablet of Hendrik van Rijn, Johan Maelwael, c.1363,
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
4.5. Detail of Virgin of the Rose Garden, Master of the Saint Lucy Legend,
c.1475–80, Detroit Institute of Arts Museum
I4.1. Detail of side panel, “Attack on the Castle of Love,” ivory casket, c.1300–25,
Musée de Cluny, Paris
I4.2. Mirror-case with “Attack on the Castle of Love,” Paris workshop, c.1320–40,
Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence
I4.3. St. Catherine of Siena Exchanging Hearts with Christ, Guidoccio Cozzarelli,
late fifteenth century, Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena
5.1. Dittico del Beato Andrea Gallerani, verso, detail showing four mendicant
pilgrims, Dietisalvi di Speme, c.1270, Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena
5.2. Detail of tapestry of Arithmetic, Flanders workshop, c.1520, Musée de
Cluny, Paris
5.3. Detail of Allegory of Good Government from The Allegory of Good and Bad
Government, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, 1338–9, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena
I5.1. Personified figures of Humility and Pride from illumination of La Somme le
Roi, workshop of Honoré, c.1280
6.1. The Last Judgment, detail of Paradise, Giovanni di Paolo, c.1460–5,
Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena
 1
Mysticism, Methodology, and
Epistemic Justice

Current efforts to expand the ‘canon’ of the history of philosophy

present an exciting opportunity to reconceptualize how philosophy
both has been and is currently practiced. In drawing attention to
voices and methodologies that have previously been overlooked,
these efforts present a vision of philosophy that more accurately
captures its multi-faceted past and points the way towards a more
interesting future. This book is presented in that spirit. Instead of
volunteering ideological nuggets mined from ancient sources or
explicating theories whose value stems in part from their very lack of
connection to current interests, my primary methodological goal is to
highlight a different, corrective and complementary, role that
historically informed philosophy can occupy.1
What follows is corrective in that it challenges existing narratives
about medieval philosophy by debunking the assumption that
medieval philosophy in the ‘Latin West’ happened only in university
settings and (thus) that women didn’t do philosophy in the Middle
Ages; it is complementary in adding to these existing narratives the
wide range of philosophical insights contained in the Christian
contemplative tradition from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries.
(See the Preface for an explanation of my choice of this particular
time period, as well as religious and regional focus.) In engaging the
work of men and women excluded by a narrow focus on scholastic
disputations, moreover, this book also enhances our understanding
of medieval philosophy as it has been traditionally understood, for
the authors of those disputations did not live in isolated bubbles—
they lived in complex societies full of political and religious intrigue
and were deeply involved in conversations that extended far beyond
the classroom, conversations that frequently included women.2
Focusing exclusively on the works of medieval women
contemplatives and mystics would, of course, present as weirdly
distorted a picture of these conversations as has been created by the
‘traditional’ focus on the works of scholastic men. It would also run
the risk of essentializing the status of these authors as women
and/or treating them as providing ‘the feminine perspective,’
whereas the truth is simply that the contributions of medieval
women have often been overlooked because of their sex, while their
contributions are shaped by their experiences as subjects occupying
particular spaces in the societies in which they wrote.3 As we’ll see
throughout this book, there is often more commonality (in views,
methodology, and interests) between women and men of the same
religious order and geographic region than between women of
different religious orders or centuries; one of my aims is to
undermine the idea that there is “a” way that women address
questions of philosophical and religious significance. Thus, although
I do prioritize women’s contributions to contemplative philosophy in
the thirteenth–fifteenth centuries—particularly in addressing
conversations in which the voices of male contemplatives such as
Meister Eckhart have already been relatively well represented—this
book draws on texts authored by women and men from a variety of
religious affiliations, social backgrounds, and geographical regions to
address contemplative views on five topics of interest to both their
scholastic counterparts and to contemporary philosophers: self-
knowledge, reason and its limits, love and the will, persons, and
immortality and the afterlife.
Before turning to these topics, however, I want to demonstrate
the need for this book (and the advantages of this corrective and
complementary method) by addressing contemporary philosophical
conceptions of mysticism and what counts as a mystical experience.
Many philosophers consider mysticism too eldritch to be the subject
of serious inquiry and rational argumentation. While contemplative
philosophy has a long and respected history (if one rather
marginalized today), mysticism generally counts as philosophy to
scholars in contemporary philosophy departments in the same way
that the crystals and tarot cards in the ‘metaphysics’ sections of
bookstores count as metaphysics—which is to say, it doesn’t. Those
philosophers who do take mysticism seriously as a philosophical
topic tend also to work in other disciplines (such as religious studies,
psychology, and cognitive science) and to operate with conceptions
of mysticism and mystical experience that are heavily indebted to
the early twentieth-century theories of William James and Evelyn
Underhill. Yet, as we’ll see in Section 1.1, those theories discount
enormous swaths of reported mystical experiences on the basis of
ideology that is deeply suspicious of embodiment. After laying out a
contemporary definition of ‘mystical experience’ that has inherited
these suspicions, I turn in Section 1.2 to look at the nature and
range of mystic experiences reported in the Rome-based Christian
tradition of the thirteenth–fifteenth centuries. The philosophical
motivations given in favor of excluding physical and affective
experiences from the set of “real” mystical experiences rest both
then and now, as we will see, on highly controversial claims about
the natures of both God and human persons. In fact, as I show in
Section 1.3, standard views of mystical experiences in the
thirteenth–fifteenth centuries enthusiastically include embodied and
affective experiences in addition to those that involve non-sensory,
selfless union. In Section 1.4 I explain how broadening
contemporary philosophical conceptions of mysticism and mystical
experience can help philosophers engage with scholars working on
similar topics in other disciplines; I conclude in Section 1.5 by
presenting an overview of the rest of this book.
 1.1 Implicit Assumptions and the Case of
‘Mystical Experience’
What it takes for an experience to count as mystical has been the
source of significant controversy. Many current definitions of
‘mystical experience’ (particularly those found in analytic philosophy
and theology) exclude embodied, non-unitive states. In so doing,
however, they exclude an enormous group of reported mystical
experiences such as visions, auditions, and other somatic
experiences. In the remainder of this section, I explicate the current
standard philosophical conception of mystical experience in light of
its twentieth-century influences, showing how prejudices against
women, emotions, and the body have played a significant role in
determining which sort of reported mystical experiences fall under
the contemporary definition and which do not.

1.1.1 A standard contemporary definition of

‘mystical experience’
To do this, I begin where everyone begins their philosophical
inquiries these days: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. As
one might expect from the SEP, the entry on ‘Mysticism’ does an
excellent job capturing current philosophical assumptions about
mysticism. Jerome Gellman, its author, begins with two definitions of
‘mystical experience.’ First, he presents a “wide definition,” as
follows:

A (purportedly) super sense-perceptual or sub sense-perceptual experience

granting acquaintance of realities or states of affairs that are of a kind not
accessible by way of sense-perception, somatosensory modalities, or
standard introspection.4
 Then he offers a ‘narrow’ definition, which is described as “more
common among philosophers”:

A (purportedly) super sense-perceptual or sub sense-perceptual unitive

experience granting acquaintance of realities or states of affairs that are of
a kind not accessible by way of sense-perception, somatosensory modalities,
or standard introspection.5

The only difference between these two definitions is the addition of

the word ‘unitive’ in the one characterized as “suiting more
specialized treatments of mysticism in philosophy.” As I discuss in
Sections 1.2 and 1.3, however, this addition is crucial for
understanding one of the main ways in which contemporary
philosophical conceptions of mysticism rule out a great deal of
reported mystical experiences.
Both definitions maintain that a mystical experience must be
either ‘super’ or ‘sub’ sense-perceptual. To count as ‘super sense-
perceptual,’ an experience must have ‘perception-like content of a
kind not appropriate to sense perception, somatosensory
modalities…or standard introspection.’6 That is, although a mystical
experience may accompany or even be occasioned by sense
perception (of, for instance, a tremendous thunderstorm), this
definition stipulates that a mystical experience must itself transcend
the senses in a distinctive way. To count as ‘sub sense-perceptual,’ in
turn, an experience must go beyond the senses in the other
direction, so that the experience contains little to no
phenomenological content. (As I discuss in Section 1.2, such
experiences are usually seen as the end achievement of a lengthy
process of self-loss or self-annihilation en route to union with the
divine.) Crucially, in insisting that a mystical experience be either
super or sub sense-perceptual, this definition rules out embodied
experiences in which a subject, say, hears God’s voice (as Moses
hears God in the burning bush), or sees visions (as John ‘sees’ the
events he records in Revelations). Gellman is clear that this exclusion
is intentional, on the grounds that this is common philosophical
practice: “Generally, philosophers have excluded purely para-sensual
experiences such as religious visions and auditions from the
mystical.”7
The emphasis on the inherently unitive nature of a mystical
experience in the more ‘philosophical’ definition is also significant.
Beginning at the outset of the twentieth century with William
James’s discussion of the ‘four marks’ of a mystical experience in
Varieties of Religious Experience,8 and continuing with Evelyn
Underhill’s influential ‘five stages of the mystic path’ in her
Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual
Consciousness,9 modern scholars of mysticism have generally upheld
a conception of selfless mystic union as the ultimate end of religious
experience.10 Thus, Underhill talks about a ‘death of selfhood’ in her
depiction of the unitive life, which she describes as the highest and
final stage of the mystic life,11 while Gellman characterizes a unitive
mystical experience as involving ‘phenomenological de-emphasis,
blurring, or eradication of multiplicity.’12 This sort of union utterly
transcends awareness of our bodies and our senses—it is what
William Alston refers to as “extreme mystical experience” in which
“all distinctions are transcended, even the distinction of subject and
object.”13 Such union is taken by many philosophers today to be
both necessary for an experience’s being mystical and the
(retroactive) sign of a “true” mystical experience. Yet, I argue, the
requirements of this definition are overly rigid and exclusive.

1.1.2 Debates about mysticism in the twentieth

century
The nature of mystical experience was a topic of interest throughout
the twentieth century.14 In the first half, influential scholars such as
William James and Evelyn Underhill focused on the psychological and
philosophical as well as religious aspects of mysticism, and there was
a general post-Freudian and Jungian interest in psychologizing such
experiences in order to uncover their true significance. This
combined with the rise of medicine as a science and increased
interest in identifying physical causes for altered mental states to
produce working definitions of ‘mysticism’ and ‘mystical experiences’
from which physical and affective states were carefully ruled out—in
part due to epistemological worries about how to distinguish genuine
religious experiences from hallucinations or medical conditions such
as epilepsy.
In the post-Auschwitz world of the second half of the twentieth
century, the search for a universal divine that encompasses all
outwardly conflicting world religions gained ground, popularized by
works such as Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces
(originally published in 1949) and W. T. Stace’s Mysticism and
Philosophy (1960). This push towards religious pluralism, epitomized
by John Hick’s work in influential volumes such as The Myth of God
Incarnate (1977) and God Has Many Names (1980), stressed the
similarities in descriptions of selfless mystic union among different
religious traditions in order to argue for a common basis for them all.
A common denominator in many of these modern discussions has
been their dismissal of embodied experiences as inferior to (or even
misleading or counterfeit versions of) “true” mystical experiences. In
ruling out these sorts of experiences, however, treatments of
mysticism have discounted many of the states reported as mystical
experiences by women, a great number of which are embodied in
some form or another.15 The assumptions made by modern
philosophers such as Nelson Pike and Steven Katz about the nature
of those experiences worth attention have negatively influenced their
approach (and the approach of those influenced by them) to the
much broader range of experiences considered mystical prior to the
twentieth century. As Grace Jantzen notes in Power, Gender, and
Christian Mysticism, contemporary scholars who unquestioningly
accept this ‘philosophical’ conception of mysticism err in not asking
“whether this is the right focus, or whether it might seriously distort
what the mystic herself considered to be essential.”16 It has also led
to a disproportionate amount of attention paid to those
contemplatives and mystics who emphasize self-loss and annihilative
union, of whom Meister Eckhart is the classic example.
The dismissal and/or mistrust of female reports of embodied
mystical experience has a long history. According to the widely
accepted Aristotelian biology of the Middle Ages, women’s mental
acuity is compromised by their bodies, which are more sensitive to
sensory perception and thus more susceptible to bodily passions and
emotions.17 Although this sensitivity makes women seem better
candidates for certain sorts of religious experiences (such as visions
and physical states such as stigmata and closure), the belief that
their bodies consistently overpower their intellective capacities
simultaneously calls into question their reports and judgments about
such experiences.18 Thus, after the surge in reported mystic
experiences in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the people
whose reports church authorities were most likely to scrutinize
closely and then condemn were predominantly female—a result, no
doubt, buoyed by further persistent cultural and religious beliefs that
women are less trustworthy than men and prone to exaggerate their
emotional and physical states.19
Although women and their bodies have been strongly associated
both with each other and with the negative side of the dualistic
binary of men/women, mind/body, reason/emotion, self/other,
active/passive, etc. in Western culture since before the time of Plato,
the role this association plays in the exclusion of embodied states
from contemporary philosophical definitions of mystical experience
has been left largely unacknowledged. In many cases, the
association between bodies and women is left implicit, as when
Evelyn Underhill dismisses reports of ecstatic union and other
sensory and physical mystic states as a result of “the infantile
craving for a sheltering and protecting love” that is “frequently
pathological.”20 We should be seeking to transcend our bodies and
ourselves, she writes, not wallowing in pleasures and pains that
speak to our personal desires. Underhill claims that somatic visions
and ecstatic experiences are not truly mystical, but instead are
frequently accompanied by other “abnormal conditions” suffered by
“emotional visionaries whose revelations have no ultimate
characteristics.”21 Underhill’s disdain for emotional and physical
claims to mystical experience is clear; what is left unsaid is that the
vast majority of these ‘emotional visionaries’ were women, and that
the mystics whose experiences typify her portrayal of the superior
unitive life—which possesses such ‘ultimate characteristics’ as self-
abnegation and transcendence of physical experience—are almost
exclusively male.
In other cases, however, the negative associations between
emotion, bodies, and women are quite explicit. David Knowles, for
example, describes the ‘pure spirituality’ of the early Middle Ages as
“contaminated” by “a more emotional and idiosyncratic form of
devotion…deriving partly from the influence of some of the women
saints of the fourteenth century, women such as Angela of Foligno,
Dorothea of Prussia, and Bridget of Sweden.”22 Like Underhill,
Knowles associates purity of spirituality with an emphasis on
transcendence of the particularities of the body and its affective
states; unlike his predecessor, Knowles makes it clear that the sort of
emotional and individual forms of religious expression which taint
the appropriately dispassionate, universal modes of true mysticism
are primarily the province of women.
Simone de Beauvoir draws the same negative connection
between women, bodies, and emotional religious experiences in her
groundbreaking work of feminist philosophy The Second Sex. In her
chapter ‘The Mystic,’ Beauvoir is sharply critical of the reported
experiences of the majority of female medieval mystics: “Not clearly
distinguishing reality from make-believe, action from magic, the
objective from the imaginary,” she writes, “Woman is peculiarly
prone to materialize the absent in her own body.”23 Women are more
likely than men to report physical mystical experiences, she argues,
because their disadvantaged status as Other has led them to
become more susceptible to religious fervor and extreme emotional
states. That is, having internalized being Other and Inessential,
Woman is more likely to passively embody religious beliefs in
physical and emotional suffering or ecstasy than she is to attempt
concrete action in the world of men from which she has been
excluded. In fact, Beauvoir maintains, Woman’s acceptance of the
promise of rewards for an earthly life of obedience in an eternal
paradise is one of the central obstacles that keeps her from working
towards transcendence and self-actualization.24
It seems clear, then, that prejudices against emotions, bodies,
and women have influenced the development of current
philosophical conceptions of what counts as a mystical experience.
Jerome Gellman, the author of the working definition quoted above,
himself admits that “the thinking that there is a common,
unconstructed, essence to mystical experience has worked against
the recognition of women’s experiences as properly mystical.”26 It
does not seem, however, that Gellman thinks this is a cause for
particular concern, much less a signal that the definition he has
offered might be faulty. As Grace Jantzen observes, “Contemporary
philosophers are seduced by a particular picture of mysticism,
inherited largely from William James, which involves them in a
stately dance of claims and counterclaims about experience and
interpretation, language and ineffability, credulity and doubt…what is
hardly ever noticed is how little resemblance they bear to the things
which preoccupied the medieval men and women whom they
themselves would consider to be paradigm mystics.”25 Yet it seems
to me that the way in which these problematic assumptions
undergird contemporary conceptions of mysticism demonstrates the
need for a serious re-examination of both the definition and how it is
applied.

1.2 Apophatic Self-Abnegation

It would be convenient to think that the negative associations of
body, emotion, and women have always worked against the
inclusion of embodied, affective experiences in the mystical canon—
we like to think of ourselves today, after all, as more enlightened
and open-minded than our historical predecessors. It would be
convenient to think this, yes, but it would be wrong. Although there
is a strain within the medieval Christian contemplative tradition that
excludes embodied experiences from what it considers ‘true’ mystical
experiences—namely apophaticism, which focuses on the ineffability
of the divine and the inability of language and thought to express
any direct experience of that divine—this strain is only one among
many. Cautions against physical and affective states from within this
strain need to be understood in the larger context in which such
embodied states were actually seen as the mystic norm. In addition,
as I argue in Section 1.3, the reasons those states were accepted as
the norm should be taken quite seriously.
The apophatic tradition in Western Christianity has a long
philosophical lineage, arguably beginning with Plato’s claims about
the nature of the Good in the Republic and continuing in the early
Middle Ages via figures such as pseudo-Dionysius and John Scotus
Eriugena, and in relation to the Islamic and Jewish mystic traditions
developing at the same time. In the thirteenth century and onward,
medieval apophaticism is typified in the works of Marguerite Porete,
Meister Eckhart, and the anonymous English Cloud of Unknowing; it
continues post-Reformation most prominently in the writings of
Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. During the centuries in which
mysticism flourished as a form of religious expression and in which it
(arguably) found its fullest form, however, apophaticism was a non-
dominant tradition, and one often seen as bordering on heresy. This
fact, of course, makes no difference for the philosophical plausibility
of the view; what is significant is that, in positing a selfless merging
with an unknowable God as the ultimate end of human existence,
apophatically minded contemplatives make highly controversial
assumptions about both God and the ultimate goal of life.
Apophatic contemplatives tend to describe the spiritual life as a
series of stages that we move through in a journey towards
unknowing union with the unknowable divine. On this journey, one
of the most important tasks is the process of cultivating self-
abnegation, or radical self-loss. In The Mirror of Simple Souls, for
instance, Marguerite Porete explains that union with God requires
the complete elimination of the conscious self. In the perfect state of
such union, “All things are one for her, without an explanation
(propter quid), and she is nothing in a One of this sort.” All the
individualizing activities of the soul—thought, will, emotion—cease:
“The Soul has nothing more to do for God than God does for her.
Why? Because He is, and she is not. She retains nothing more of
herself in nothingness, because He is sufficient of Himself, because
He is and she is not.” In the ultimate expression of annihilative
union, “She is stripped of all things because she is without existence,
where she was before she was created.”27 This stress on self-
abnegation runs throughout Porete’s work: annihilation of
individuality is essential for the highest form of union with God.
Meister Eckhart also frequently exhorts his listeners to detach
themselves from all individual affections and desires, in preparation
for the self-abnegation that allows God to be all. In Counsel 23, he
states: “There is still one work [after the soul has detached itself
from worldly concerns] that remains proper and his own, and that is
annihilation of self.”28 It is often unclear in such texts precisely how
to understand this self-abnegation (is it meant to be understood
literally or metaphorically, ontologically or phenomenologically?), but
the stress on removing any sense of self that might impede
complete union with God is consistent throughout the apophatic
tradition. In extreme cases, apophatic mystics even portray self-
abnegation as allowing for an identity of the mystic with God; when
no egoistic self remains, one can be filled with God to the point
where one becomes God. (For further discussion, see Section 5.2.)
Given this emphasis on eliminating all sense of individual
selfhood, it is not surprising that apophatic texts frequently caution
their readers against taking physical and emotional states to be
signs of mystic union. Such states may indicate a sort of spiritual
progress, but they are not themselves either necessary or sufficient
for attaining the goal of the contemplative life. The anonymous
English Cloud of Unknowing, for instance, advises us to “Mistrust all
consolations, sounds, gladness, and sweet ecstasies that come
suddenly and externally.”29 In his late-fourteenth-century The Scale
of Perfection, Walter Hilton also warns against accepting physical
sensations as signs of true mystic union, whether “by sounding of
the ear, or savoring in the mouth, smelling at the nose, or else any
sensible heat like a fire glowing and warming the breast or any other
part of the body.” Such an experience, he writes, “though it be ever
so comfortable and liking,” is not itself true contemplation but is,
rather, “simple and secondary” to the knowing and loving of God
that accompanies the real thing.30 This is a direct jab at Richard
Rolle’s earlier Fire of Love, which describes Rolle’s mystical
experiences as including physical warmth in his body (especially his
chest), a sense of surpassing sweetness, and the sound of celestial
music. The Cloud of Unknowing takes aim at Rolle’s ‘fire of love’ as
well, attributing such embodied experiences to novices who “mistake
a high-strung excitement and warmth in their cheeks for the genuine
fire of love kindled by the grace and goodness of the Holy Spirit
deep within our hearts.”31 The Cloud even goes on to caution that
such experiences might have sinister origins: “The devil has his own
contemplatives, just as God does.”32 Meister Eckhart, in turn, “tartly
condemn[s] those who want to see God with the same eyes with
which they behold a cow.”33
In all these cases, God is characterized as utterly unknowable
and, at least for Eckhart and Porete, beyond being itself. Experience
of such a God necessarily transcends physical and affective
experience: for many apophatics, it entails the loss of individual
experience altogether. On the view according to which human beings
reach their ultimate end by perfecting the act of self-annihilation, the
highest form of mystical union is one in which neither human beings
nor God exist in standard ways. In part because of this,
apophaticism was never the leading mystical tradition in the
medieval period. Instead, the dominant tradition was a more body-
friendly and affective mysticism—a mysticism embraced by a large
variety of religious communities throughout Europe during the
thirteenth–fifteenth centuries (the point at which Western Christian
contemplative movements were at their height). I turn now to a
closer examination of this tradition.

1.3 Correcting via Complementing: Embracing

Embodied Experiences
As we saw in Section 1.1, affective mysticism has often been
dismissed because of its association with the body and with
emotions. Ruling out affective experiences as properly mystical for
this reason, however, is to miss the significance of such reported
forms of connection with the divine. Human beings are physical and
affective as well as intellective and volitional beings: our primary
interaction with reality—created and divine—is physical. Whereas the
apophatic tradition urges us to transcend those modes of interaction,
the affective tradition encourages us to delve more deeply into them.
Once we recognize the problematic prejudices that shaped the
contemporary conception of mystical experience and the
controversial philosophical assumptions underlying the apophatic
exclusion of embodied experiences, we are in a position to see the
rich history of embodied mystical experiences reported in the Middle
Ages as offering a vital complement to the narrow range of religious
experiences which currently serve as the main focus of analytic
philosophers and theologians.
The medieval emphasis on embodied contemplative experiences
developed in part as a response to twelfth-century gnostic
movements that either denied or de-emphasized Christ’s humanity
and taught the need for purifying our immaterial souls from the
inherently corrupt material realm. In other words, the push to
transcend our bodies in apophatic mystical union was viewed as
displaying an important misunderstanding of both God and human
nature. In the mainstream contemplative tradition, figures as diverse
in education, social status, and geographical location as Hadewijch
(a Flemish Augustinian), Catherine of Siena (an Italian Dominican),
Richard Rolle (an English hermit), Marguerite d’Oingt (a French
Carthusian nun), and Angela of Foligno (an Italian Franciscan)
viewed altered physical states such as mystic death or bodily
‘closure,’ emotional states such as uncontrollable weeping or
laughter, and parasensory states such as visions and auditions not as
distracting from true mystic union but as important ways of
experiencing a direct connection with the God who had become
incarnate for us.
One sign that this tradition understood the spiritual subject as a
holistic union of body and soul (as opposed to a soul seeking to rise
above the material realm) is its reliance on the imagination. In the
thirteenth century and onward, the imagination was generally taken
to be the faculty of the human soul that stores mental ‘pictures’
formed via information collected by the external senses and then is
able to combine those images in both familiar and unfamiliar ways.
In a popular spiritual exercise of the time called ‘meditation’
(meditatio), contemplatives were encouraged to imagine themselves
present at key moments of Christ’s life, particularly his Passion; the
explicit purpose of these exercises was to generate certain sorts of
affective responses that would deepen the subject’s devotion. (See
Chapter 4 for further discussion of both the role of imagination and
the medieval practice of meditation.)
This use of the imagination in spiritual exercises was also closely
linked with the idea of ‘spiritual vision’ (visio spiritualis), a concept
borrowed from the Augustinian Platonic tradition. In contrast both to
the sort of material vision (via the eye) which is directed at physical
objects and to the sort of intellective vision (via reason) which is
directed at divine truths, spiritual vision is directed at images held in
the imagination. As such, it mediates between our physical sense
capacities and our intellective and volitional capacities; physical
experiences and intellective experiences come together and are
combined in significant ways in spiritual vision (also associated in
this tradition with the ‘inner senses’ and the ‘inner body’). In the
affective mystical tradition, meditative exercises such as imagining
oneself present at the birth of Jesus enable the inner senses to
undergo spiritual experiences with transformative physical and
intellective/volitional effects. Such meditation helps us to “construct
an inner space that creates affectively embodied access to the
divine.”34
Because strong emotion was closely linked in the later Middle
Ages both to bodies and to our ability to imagine things vividly
(driving us to deeper devotion and closer communion with God), it
was particularly welcomed in forms of religious expression that
celebrated Christ’s Incarnation. Rather than being discounted as the
result of overexcited sensory capacities, the mystical visions,
auditions, smellings, tastings, etc. associated with such emotions
were generally understood to be important spiritual experiences, and
valued as such.35 Embodied mystical experiences were seen as
connecting the human subject to God in ways that enhanced rather
than abnegated our distinctive humanity. In the words of Catherine
Walker Bynum, “All Christ’s members—eyes, breasts, lips and so on
—were seen as testimony to his humanation, and the devout soul
responded to this enfleshing with all its bodily capabilities.”36
A striking example of this can be found in a vision of Hadewijch
which she reports receiving during a celebration of the Eucharist—a
particularly significant act in the medieval affective tradition, since it
involves a connection between Christ and the worshiper that is both
mystical and physical.37 Hadewijch writes that Christ appeared to her
“in the form and clothing of a Man, as he was on the day when he
gave us his Body for the first time” (that is, at the Last Supper).38
Christ then shares himself with Hadewijch, first via the elements
(“he gave himself to me in the shape of the Sacrament, in its
outward form, as the custom is; and then he gave me to drink from
the chalice, in form and taste, as the custom is”), and then in human
form: “After that he came himself to me, took me entirely in his
arms, and pressed me to him; and all my members felt his in full
felicity, in accordance with the desire of my heart and my humanity.”
This embrace is not the end of Hadewijch’s experience, however.
After she enjoys Christ’s presence for a brief time, she writes that “I
saw him completely come to naught and so fade and all at once
dissolve that I could no longer recognize or perceive him outside me,
and I could no longer distinguish him within me. Then it was to me
as if we were one without difference.”
This account begins with not just one but two different sorts of
embodied union with Christ, and it is significant that Hadewijch
describes it as fulfilling the desire of her humanity. (See Chapter 5
for further discussion of this vision.) Even when she reports the later
experience of being “one without difference,” the metaphor at play is
one of physical digestion: Christ has become one with her (and she
with him) in the way that food and drink become one with us—part
of our very being. Hadewijch also sometimes describes mystical
union that involves a loss of self, but she consistently does so
without downplaying the significance of affective and embodied
experiences.39
This acknowledgment of the importance of physicality for human
subjects is present in Hadewijch’s letters as well. In one particularly
striking depiction of union with the divine, for instance, she
describes how mystical union can also involve eternal self-
preservation:

Where the abyss of his wisdom is, God will teach you what he is, and with
what wondrous sweetness the loved one and the Beloved dwell one in the
other, and how they penetrate each other in a way that neither of the two
distinguishes himself from the other. But they abide in one another in
fruition, mouth in mouth, heart in heart, body in body, and soul in soul,
while one sweet divine nature flows through both and they are both one
thing through each other, but at the same time remain two different selves
– yes, and remain so forever.40

Another striking portrayal of physical and self-preserving mystical

union can be found in Marguerite d’Oingt, who reports a vision in
which she is a withered tree which is turned completely upside down
and then renewed by a torrent of water rushing down from a nearby
mountain. (See Subsection 2.2.3 for the medieval contemplative use
of ‘tree’ metaphors to signify the self.) Having drawn the ‘living
water’ (that is, Christ) into herself, Marguerite sees the names of the
five senses written on her newly revived leaves.41 The vision
Another random document with
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 In the pause that followed, Emmons turned to the lawyer.
“Now, you are a clever man, Mr. Overton,” he said easily. “Perhaps
you can explain to me, why it is that a fellow who is known to be a
thief and a liar should be in such a hurry to write himself down a
murderer as well?”
The tone and manner of the interruption, coming at a moment of
high emotion, were too much for Vickers’s temper. He turned on
Emmons white with rage.
“I’ve stood about as much as I mean to stand from you,” he said.
“Overton and Nellie are welcome to believe me or not as they like,
but you will either believe me or leave this house.”
His tone was so menacing that Overton stood up, expecting
trouble, but it was Nellie who spoke.
“James will do nothing of the kind,” she said. “If you are not Bob
Lee you have no right to say who shall stay in this house and who
shall not. The house is mine, and I won’t have any one in it who can’t
be civil to James.”
“Then you certainly can’t have me,” said Vickers.
“It seems not,” answered Nellie.
They exchanged such a steel-like glance as only those who love
each other can inflict, and then Vickers flung out of the house.
When, a few minutes later, Overton caught up with him, his anger
had not cooled.
“Hush, hush, my dear fellow,” said the lawyer. “Hilltop is not
accustomed to such language. Let a spirited lady have her heroics if
she wants.”
 Chapter XI
Left alone with her fiancé, perhaps Nellie expected a word of
praise for her gallant public demonstration in his favor. If so, she was
disappointed.
“Upon my word!” he exclaimed, as the door shut after Vickers. “I
never in all my life heard such an audacious impostor. Imagine his
daring to pass himself off as Mr. Lee’s son throughout an entire
month!”
“He told me within twenty-four hours of his arrival that he was not
Bob Lee, and I think he told you, too, James; only you would not
believe him.”
Emmons took no notice of this reply, but continued his own train of
thought. “When I think that for four weeks you have been practically
alone in the house with an escaped murderer—for I don’t believe a
word of all this story about false testimony—my blood runs cold. And
it is only by the merest chance that we have succeeded in rescuing
all your uncle’s property from his hands.”
“I think you are wrong, James. Mr. Vickers never intended to
accept my uncle’s property.”
“My dear Nellie! Women are so extraordinarily innocent in financial
matters. That was the object of his whole plot.”
“I don’t think it was a plot. It seems to me, indeed, that we both
owe an apology to Mr. Vickers.”
“An apology!” said Emmons, and his color deepened. “I think you
must be mad, Nellie. I think I owe an apology to the community for
having left him at large so long. I ought to have telegraphed to the
sheriff of Vickers’s Crossing at once, and I mean to do so without
delay.”
 Nellie rose to her feet. “If you do that, James—” she began, and
then, perhaps remembering that she had been accused of being
over-fond of threats in the past, she changed her tone. “You will not
do that, I am sure, James, when you stop to consider that you heard
Mr. Vickers’s story only because I insisted on having you present. It
would be a breach of confidence to me as well as to him.”
Emmons laughed. “The law, my dear girl,” he said, “does not take
cognizance of these fine points. It is my duty when I have my hand
on an escaped murderer to close it, and I intend to do so. He
probably means to leave Hilltop to-night, and I shall not be able to
get a warrant from Vickers’s Crossing until to-morrow, but I can
arrange with the local authorities to arrest him on some trumped-up
charge that will hold him, until we get the papers.”
He moved toward the door; to his surprise Nellie was there before
him.
“One moment,” she said. “I don’t think you understand how I feel
about this matter. I know Mr. Vickers better than you do. Whatever
he may have done in the past, I feel myself under obligations to him.
He has done more than you can even imagine, James, to make my
uncle’s last days happy. He has been more considerate of me,” she
hesitated, and then went on,—“more considerate of me, in some
ways, than any one I have ever met, though I have been uniformly
insolent and high-handed with him. I admire Mr. Vickers in many
respects.”
“It is not ten minutes, however, since you turned him out of your
house.”
Nellie was silent, and then she made a decisive gesture. “I will not
have you telegraph for that warrant, James. I let you stay under the
impression that you were an honorable man, and I will not have Mr.
Vickers betrayed through my mistake.”
“Honor! betrayed!” cried Emmons. “Aren’t we using pretty big
words about the arrest of a common criminal? I am very sorry if you
disapprove, Nellie, but I have never yet allowed man or woman to
interfere with what I consider my duty, and I don’t mean to now. Let
me pass, please.”
She did not at once move. “Oh, I’ll let you pass, James,” she
answered deliberately, “only I want you to understand what it means.
I won’t marry you, if you do this. I don’t know that I could bring myself
to marry you anyhow, now.”
She had the art of irritating her opponent, and Emmons exclaimed,
“I dare say you prefer this jailbird to me.”
She did not reply in words, but she moved away from the door,
and Emmons went out of it. The instant he had gone she rang the
bell, and when Plimpton appeared she said: “Tell the coachman that
I want a trap and the fastest horse of the pair just as quickly as he
can get it. Tell him to hurry, Plimpton.”
Plimpton bowed, though he did not approve of servants being
hurried. He liked orders to be given in time. Nevertheless, he gave
her message, and within half an hour she was in Mr. Overton’s
drawing-room. The great man greeted her warmly.
“Do you know, my dear Nellie,” he said, almost as he entered, “I
was just thinking that I ought to have made an appointment to see
you again. Of course you are in a hurry to get a complete schedule
of your new possessions, and to know what you may count on in the
future. Shall we say to-morrow—that is Saturday, isn’t it?—about
three?”
“Oh, there is not the least hurry about that,” returned Nellie, and
her manner was unusually agitated, “any time you like. I did not
come about that. I came to ask you if you knew where Bob is—Mr.
Vickers, I mean?”
“Yes,” said Overton, “I do!”
“Something dreadful has happened,” Nellie went on with less and
less composure. “I have only just found it out. As soon as our
interview was over, James Emmons told me he meant to telegraph
to Vickers’s Crossing, or whatever the name of the place is, for a
warrant. He expects to be able to arrest Mr. Vickers at once.”
 “He does, does he—the hound!” cried Overton, for the first time
losing his temper. He rang a bell, and when a servant answered it he
ordered a trap to be ready at once. Returning to Nellie, he found that
she had buried her face in her handkerchief, and he repented his
violence.
“There, there, forgive me, Miss Nellie,” he said. “I did not mean to
call him a hound. I forgot that you were going to marry him.”
“Oh, don’t apologize to me,” replied Nellie, with some animation; “I
wish I had said it myself. I am not going to marry him.”
The news startled Overton. “Why, is that wise, my dear child?” he
said. “Perhaps neither of us does him justice. He is a good, steady,
reliable man, and if I were you, I would not go back on him in a
hurry.”
“He is not any one of those things,” said Nellie, drying her eyes,
and looking as dignified as the process allowed. “He is base. He took
advantage of what he heard in confidence—of what he only heard at
all because I made a point of his being there. Is that reliable, or
steady? I call it dishonorable and I would rather die than marry such
a creature, and so I told him.”
“You know your own business best,” answered Overton, “but the
world is a sad place for lonely women.”
“It would be a very sad place for both James and me, if I married
him feeling as I do,” said Nellie, and judging by her expression
Overton was inclined to agree with her. “It was all very well while I
could respect James, but now——”
“Still, ordinary prudence—” the lawyer began, but she interrupted.
“Don’t talk to me about ordinary prudence. That is what led me into
the awful mistake of being engaged to him at all. I thought it would
be wise. I used to get thinking about the future, and whether I should
have anything to live on——”
“And you don’t think of these things now?”
“I don’t care sixpence about the future,” returned Nellie, “and I’m
sure I don’t know why I’ve been crying, except that I am tired, and I
think I’ll go home. You’ll warn Mr. Vickers, won’t you?”
“I will,” said Overton.
Nellie still hesitated. “He is here, I suppose.”
“Yes. He was thinking of staying to dine with me, and taking a late
train to town. He has a steamer to catch to-morrow; but after what
you say”—Overton looked at his watch—“I rather think that he had
better go at once. There’s a train within half an hour.”
“Oh, he had much better go at once, before James has time to
make trouble,” she answered; and then added gravely, “Mr. Overton,
do you believe that the murder happened just as Mr. Vickers said?”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“So do I,” Overton answered, “but then I have some reason, for I
remember something of the case, which was a very celebrated one
up the State. And now, Nellie, I’ll tell you a secret which I wouldn’t
trust to any one else. I have an impression—a vague one, but still I
trust it—that that case was set straight, somehow or other. If it
should be——”
“Telegraph and find out.”
“I wrote some days ago—the night before your uncle was taken ill;
but I have had no answer. But mind, don’t tell him. It would be too
cruel, if I should turn out to be wrong.”
“I?” said Nellie. “I don’t ever expect to see the man again.”
“I suppose not,” he returned, “and yet I wish it were not too much
to ask you to take him to the station in your trap. He won’t have more
than time, and mine has not come to the door yet.”
Nellie looked as if she were going to refuse, but when she spoke
she spoke quite definitely: “I’ll take him,” she said.
“Thank you,” said Overton, and left the room.
In his library he found Vickers standing on the hearthrug, though
there was no fire in the chimney-place. His head was bent and he
was vaguely chinking some coins in his pocket.
“Well, Vickers,” said his host coolly, “I have a disagreeable piece of
news for you. Emmons, it seems, has telegraphed for a warrant, and
does not intend to let you go until he gets it, but possibly he won’t be
prepared for your slipping away at once. There’s a train at five-ten.
Do you care to try it?”
Vickers looked up, as if the whole matter were of very small
interest to him. “There does not seem to be anything else to do, does
there?” he said.
“Of course, my offer of a position is still open to you.”
“I can’t stay in this country with Emmons on my heels. They’d lock
me up in a minute.”
“You have never heard anything further about your case, have
you?”
“Not a word. There wasn’t much to hear, I expect. I suppose I had
better be going.”
“Your bags are at the Lees’ still, aren’t they?”
“And can stay there, for all I care. I’ll not put foot in that house
again.”
“I hope you don’t feel too resentfully towards Miss Lee,” Overton
began, “for in the first place it was she who brought me word of this
move of Emmons, and in the second——”
“I don’t feel resentful at all,” interrupted Vickers. “But I don’t feel as
if I wanted to go out of my way to see her again.”
“And in the second,” Overton went on, “the only way you can
possibly catch your train now is to let her drive you down. She has a
trap outside, and she seemed to be——”
He paused, for the door had slammed behind Vickers, and when
he followed, the two were already in the trap. Overton smiled.
“That’s right,” he said, “make haste; but you might at least say
good-by to a man you may never see again. Good-by, my dear
fellow; good luck.”
Vickers, a little ashamed, shook hands with the older man in
silence, and Overton went on: “Whatever happens, Vickers, do not
resist arrest. I have ordered a trap and I’ll follow you as soon as it
comes. Not that I anticipate any trouble.”
They drove away, and Overton as he entered the house murmured
to himself, “Not that they listened to a word I said.”
Yet if they had not listened, it did not seem to be from any desire
to talk themselves. They drove out of the gates in silence, and had
gone some distance before Nellie asked,
“Where shall you go to-night, Mr. Vickers?”
“Thank you for your interest,” returned Vickers bitterly, “but it
seems that my plans have been quite sufficiently spread about
Hilltop. Perhaps it would be as well for me not to answer your
question. I am going away.”
Not unnaturally this speech angered Nellie. “You do not seem to
understand,” she said, “that I came to warn you that you must go.”
“I was going anyhow,” he retorted, “but of course I am very much
obliged to you for any trouble you may have taken.”
“I thought it my duty,” she began, but he interrupted her with a
laugh.
“Your duty, of course. You never do anything from any other
motive. That is exactly why I do not tell you my plans. You might feel
it your duty to repeat them to Emmons. I think I remember your
saying that you always tell him everything.”
“You are making it,” said Nellie, in a voice as cool as his own,
“rather difficult for me to say what I think is due to you—and that is
that I owe you an apology for having insisted yesterday——”
“You owe me so many apologies,” returned Vickers, “that you will
hardly have time to make them between here and the station, so
perhaps it is hardly worth while to begin.”
 “You have a right to take this tone with me,” said Nellie, acutely
aware how often she had taken it with him. “But you shall not keep
me from saying, Mr. Vickers, that I am very conscious of how ill I
have treated you, and that your patience has given me a respect for
you—” She stopped, for Vickers laughed contemptuously; but as he
said nothing in answer, she presently went on again: “I do not know
what it is that strikes you as ludicrous in what I am saying. I was
going to add that I should like to hear, now and then, how you are
getting on, if it is not too much to ask.”
He turned on her. “You mean you want me to write to you?”
She nodded.
“I am afraid your future husband would not approve of the
correspondence, and as you tell him everything—no, I had far better
risk it now, and tell you my plans at once. I am going to South
America, where I am going to be a real live general over a small but
excellent little army. I know, for I made some of it myself.”
“And will you be safe there?”
“Yes, if you mean from Emmons and the process of the law. On
the other hand, some people do not consider soldiering the very
safest of professions—especially in those countries, where they
sometimes really fight, and, contrary to the popular notion, when
they do fight, it is very much the real thing. Fancy your feelings,
Nellie, when some day you read in the papers: ‘The one irreparable
loss to the Liberal party was the death of General Don Luis Vickers,
who died at the head of his column....’ Ah, I should die happy, if only
I could die with sufficient glory to induce Emmons to refer to me in
public as ‘an odd sort of fellow, a cousin of my wife’s.’ I can hear him.
My spirit would return to gloat.”
“He will never say that,” said Nellie, with a meaning which Vickers,
unhappily, lost.
“Ah, you can’t tell, Nellie. ‘General Luis Vickers’ sounds so much
better than ‘Vickers, the man the police want.’ And Emmons’s
standards, I notice, depend almost entirely on what people say.
Nellie,” he went on suddenly, “I have something to say to you. You
and I are never going to see each other again, and Heaven knows I
don’t want to write to you or hear from you again. This is all there will
ever be, and I am going to offer you a piece of advice as if I were
going to die to-morrow. Don’t marry Emmons! He is not the right sort.
Perhaps you think I have no right to criticise a man who has always
kept a good deal straighter than I, but it is just because I have
knocked about that I know. He won’t do. You are independent now.
Your farm will bring you in something. Keep the fellow I put in there,
and sell a few of the upland lots. You won’t be rich, but you’ll be
comfortable. Don’t marry Emmons.”
“Why do you say this to me?”
“Because I know it’s the right thing to say. I can say anything to
you. As far as a woman like you is concerned, I realize a man like
myself—without a cent, without even a decent name—doesn’t exist
at all; not even Emmons himself could suppose that in advising you
not to marry him, I have any hope for myself.”
“And yet that is just what he does think.” She forced herself to look
at him, and her look had the anxious temerity of a child who has just
defied its elders.
“Nellie, what do you mean?”
“I am not going to marry Mr. Emmons.”
“You are not! You are not!! Oh, my darling! What a place the world
is! Have I really lost you?”
Nellie smiled at him, without turning her head. “I thought you had
no hope.”
He had no sense of decency, for he kissed her twice on the public
highway. “I haven’t,” he answered. “I can’t stay, and you can’t go with
me. Imagine you in the tropics.”
“I certainly can’t go if I’m not asked.”
“Think what you are saying to me, woman,” he answered. “In
another moment I shall ask you if you love me, and then——”
 She turned to him, and put her hand in his. “Suppose you do ask
me,” she said.
Vickers held it, and bent his head over it, and laid it against his
mouth, but he shook his head. “No,” he said, “I won’t. I have just one
or two remnants of decency left, and I won’t do that.”
He stopped: for Nellie had turned the horse down an unexpected
road. “Where are you going?” he said.
“Back to the house. You can’t sail without your things.”
“My dear girl, I’ve spent half my life traveling without my things.”
“Well, you aren’t going to do it any more,” she answered, and her
tone had so domestic a flavor that he kissed her again.
Plimpton met them in the hall, and Nellie lost no time.
“Pack Mr. Vickers’s things at once, please,” she said, and would
have passed on, but she was arrested by Plimpton’s voice.
“Whose, Madam?” he asked; like many men of parts, he believed
that to be puzzled and to be insulted are much the same thing.
“Mine, Plimpton, mine,” said Vickers. “And just for once leave out
as much of the tissue paper and cotton wool as possible. I’ve a train
to catch.”
“And tell my maid to pack something for me—as much as she can
get into a valise; and tea at once, Plimpton.”
Plimpton did not say that he totally disapproved of the whole plan,
but his tone was very cold, as he said that tea was already served in
the drawing-room.
“Goodness only knows when we shall see food again,” Nellie
remarked as she sat down behind the tea-kettle.
“I can hardly catch my train, Nellie.”
“No matter. We can drive over to the other line—nine or ten miles.”
“It will be rather a long lonely journey back, won’t it?”
 “For the horse, you mean?” said Nellie. “Well, to tell the truth I
don’t exactly know how the horse is going to get back and I don’t
much care.”
“Nellie,” said Vickers, and he laid his hand on her shoulder with a
gesture that was almost paternal. “I can’t let you do this. You have no
idea what a life it would be,—what it would mean to be the wife of a
man who——”
“I shall know very soon,” returned she irrepressibly. “But I have
some idea what a life it would be to be left behind, and so I am afraid
you must put this newly-found prudence of yours in your pocket, and
make up your mind——”
But she did not finish a sentence whose end was fairly obvious, for
the door was thrown open in Plimpton’s best manner, and Emmons
entered. He stopped on seeing Vickers, and stared at him with round
eyes.
“You!” he cried. “This is the last place I should have thought of
looking for you.”
“But does not a meeting like this make amends—” Vickers began
lightly, but Nellie struck a better note with her cool: “I should think
this would have been the most natural place to look. Tea, James?”
“No, thank you,” replied Emmons sternly. “I’ve no time for tea just
now. I parted from the sheriff not ten minutes ago, and I must go and
find him at once.”
“Sorry you won’t stay and have a chat,” said Vickers. “But
doubtless you know best.”
“You’ll find out what I know within half an hour,” said Emmons, and
left the room, slamming the door behind him.
“James is developing quite a taste for repartee,” observed Vickers.
Nellie rose, put out the light under the kettle, and began to draw on
her gloves. “We must start now,” she said.
“Now, or never,” said Vickers.
 They were half-way down the drive before Nellie asked in the most
matter-of-fact tone, “Are the bags in?”
He nodded.
“Mine, too?”
“Yours, too, Nellie. Weak-kneed that I am, when I felt it in my hand,
I said a brave man would leave this one behind, but—I put it in.”
Catching his eye, she smiled. “That was very kind of you,” she
said, “for I, you know, have not spent half my life traveling without my
things.”
 A NEW NOVEL OF UNUSUAL MERIT
H. H. BASHFORD’S
THE PILGRIMS’ MARCH
3rd printing. $1.50
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 AS THE HAGUE ORDAINS
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 ANTHONY HOPE’S RUPERT OF HENTZAU
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