1. Introduction
Saint Gertrude of Helfta (1256–c. 1302), patron saint of the dead, is known for her humility, her love for others and for God, and her visions. She is also one of the earliest known writers who expressed devotion to the Sacred Heart. Many of her experiences are recorded in the Herald of Divine Love (Legatus Divinae Pietatis), a five-book devotional work written by Gertrude and other nuns at the convent of Saint Mary at Helfta, Saxony. Gertrude is regarded as the author of the second book of the Herald, often referred to as the Memorial of the Abundance of Divine Sweetness. In this book, she describes her struggles with vanity and worldly distraction, her striving for humility, and her visions of God, her “sweetest lover” and “bridegroom” (23.1–4; unless otherwise stated, citations refer to chapter and section numbers of Book II of Gertrude of Helfta, Œuvres Spirituelles, tome II, ed. by P. Doyère (1967).
For a modern reader unschooled in medieval literature, reading the Memorial may resemble mining: one encounters disorienting, labyrinthine passages, apparent dead ends, and seemingly dense, barren material. Veins of silver and precious stones seem few and far between. This is how the text may appear to those who are impatient or who lack humility. As Gertrude makes clear, humility is a prerequisite for a deep understanding of the Memorial. What follows is an exploration of humility and its mirror image, pride, as seen through the lens of the Memorial and related works that shed light on Gertrude’s visions.
Taken as a whole, not humility but love lies at the center of the Memorial. While pride bars the way, humility lays the groundwork for love. Gertrude expresses such love in the tradition of Minnemystik—love mysticism. For Gertrude, humility and love are tightly interwoven.
2 Gertrude, Narcissus, and Eve
Although she has been dubbed “Saint Gertrude the Great,” in the Memorial Gertrude describes herself as the diametric opposite. If we take her words to heart, “Gertrude the Useless” and “Gertrude the Unworthy” appear to be more fitting titles. Gertrude writes that she is “vile” and “unworthy and ungrateful” (10.2, 19.1); she is “the most worthless and useless” of God’s instruments (20.1). She has succumbed to “malice and wickedness” (20.6) and is “a worm of extreme worthlessness” (6.1). Her heart, she writes, is a container of filth and waste, a cesspool (5.5).
Moreover, Gertrude confesses that she has assaulted God “in thought, word, and deed,” especially because she has used His gifts “so faithlessly, negligently, and irreverently” (5.4). This is the consequence of her ingratitude, her vanity, and worldly distraction.
However, before she fully succumbed to these vices, a “disturbance” radically changed her. In the opening chapter of the Memorial, she writes:
You, Truth, O God, more serene than all light but more inward than any secret, had decided to temper the density of my darkness, sweetly and gently beginning with the calming of that disturbance which you had stirred up in my heart a month before. With that disturbance, as I believe, you were seeking to destroy the tower of my vanity and worldliness, into which my pride had grown … (1.1)
Gertrude’s image of a “tower of vanity” suggests a citadel or fortress in which she preserved her self-image. At the same time, the tower evokes another image used by Gertrude, that of a prison; in a later chapter, she writes of her “untimely desire to be freed from the prison of miserable flesh” (19.1). Together, these images paint the picture of someone who is trapped inside a structure that is simultaneously a fortress and a prison.
Vanity, as traditionally understood by theologians, is a social form of pride. Pride lays the foundation for vanity: when we think too highly of ourselves, we eventually see ourselves as inherently above others. This self-image of superiority, a “daughter” of pride, in time becomes an imago—a self-image—woven into the imagination. The imago, as a fantasy self with which we identify, seems to protect us—it serves as a form of armor—but ultimately it ensnares us.
Art and literature provide the groundwork for our collective understanding of pride and vanity. As such, they are useful for gaining insight into Gertrude’s experiences, even if by contrast. For example, Narcissus, as described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, was also transfixed by his own image. His reflection in the water, “the shadow of a reflected form,” a force that “has no substance of its own,” captivated him (Metamorphoses III, 435). In this way, pride and vanity seduce; they yield shallow pleasure in the short run, but in the end they lay waste to us. Apart from his reflection, Narcissus was blind to the reality of others and to everything around him. As a result, he scorned the advances of his beautiful lover, the nymph Echo. Eventually, he perished in his self-infatuation while Echo wasted away.
Though it usually takes less visible forms, the plight of Narcissus is the plight of many. Gertrude was an exception. Though she temporarily succumbed to vainglory, in time she was saved by the aforementioned “disturbance” that ultimately shattered whatever self-illusions had ensnared her.
In this way, Gertrude was much like Eve before her fall, as described in Milton’s Paradise Lost. In this poem, Eve, having just woken, comes across “waters issu’d from a cave, and spread / Into a liquid plain,” waters that seemed to her “another sky.” As she bends down to look, she becomes enamored with her reflection, a “shape within the wat’ry gleam.” Transfixed by her image in the water, Eve states:
There I had fix’d
Mine eyes till now, and pin’d with vain desire,
Had not a voice thus warn’d me: ‘What thou seest
What there thou seest, fair creature, is thyself:
With thee it came and goes; but follow me,
And I will bring thee where no shadow stays
Thy coming and thy soft embraces—he
Whose image thou art; him thou shalt enjoy
Inseparably thine … ’ (4:465–473)
Eve, like Narcissus, had been captured by her own self-image. Unless the voice had drawn her away, she would have been petrified by her “vain desire.” But, unlike Narcissus, she is freed from the trap by a divine warning. The “disturbance” which demolished Gertrude’s tower of vanity served the same purpose: it broke the spell that had bewitched her.
Like the watery reflections of Eve and Narcissus, the illusory self of pride and vainglory is, we may imagine, a kind of shadow self, a self that is almost nothing. This “almost” is what gives it its power. That which is not truly present is not powerless: the shadow on a sundial tells the time, for example. Likewise, a false self can bind us to a “new self,” or so it would seem. It’s precisely because the false self isn’t quite real that it is so powerful. One self-image, once shattered, quickly gives rise to another. One may say: “I may no longer be good, but now I am strong … I may no longer be strong, but now I am rich … I may no longer be rich, but now I am …” There are no limits to these schemes apart from the limits of our mortality.
Succumbing to pride, to paraphrase Lacan and writers of his ilk, is akin to “suturing the void”: it is an illusory reconstruction of a fragmented identity. Pride may allow us to feel whole, self-sufficient and self-made, superior in one way or another. Essentially, it serves as a defensive enclosure. But that which may appear to be whole is in reality broken. Before Gertrude reached the “inmost depths” of her heart—a common image in the Memorial—she emptied herself of self-illusion. The tower of her vanity and worldliness was a barrier between her and her heart, hence between her and the presence of Christ.
3. The False Princess
Pride, vanity, and imprisonment are vividly symbolized in Konstantin Flavitsky’s Princess Tarakanova (1864), a painting that depicts an impostor who falsely claimed to be the rightful heir to the Russian throne. According to legendary accounts of her life, when her schemes were exposed, the princess was imprisoned in a fortress in Saint Petersburg, where she drowned during the Great Flood of 1777.
In contrast to the Memorial, Flavitsky’s painting highlights the basic oppositions underlying Saint Gertrude’s text: pride and humility, falsehood and truth, despair and love. The water breaking into the prison cell represents time, that which consumes the flesh and lays waste to our earthly lives. For the princess, time brings a horrifying end to a tragic life of make-believe; for Gertrude, time is not the end but a delay, a slow progression to the death of her body and her entry into her bridal chamber. Either way, time is a cross.
In Plato’s dialogue on Eros, the Symposium, Socrates’ teacher, Diotima, states: “This is the true evil of ignorance: to be devoid of beauty and goodness, to lack intelligence, yet to imagine oneself complete. Naturally, no one desires what they do not believe they lack” (204a). Princess Tarakanova, like Macbeth, likely believed that once she had attained the throne, she would need nothing else—all would be fulfilled. The throne would consummate her life. Gertrude takes the opposite approach: by seeing herself as “so excessively unworthy” (3.2) she avoids the trap of being content with herself, she sees through her worldly desires, and she frees herself from pride. Gertrude, in her self-deprecation, is not unlike Socrates confessing that his “wisdom” is akin to a dream (Symposium, 175e). Compared to divine wisdom, which is infinite, human wisdom is next to nothing.
Given the above, are we that different from Princess Tarakanova, the “impostor”? Given the word’s roots, to be an impostor is to impose. How many of us have never, even in our youth, imposed on others in an attempt to appear as “someone else”: someone more intelligent, more worthy, more useful?
Saint Augustine writes that the self in pride abandons the Father and becomes “a kind of end to itself … it becomes its own satisfaction” (The City of God, 14.13). But the self, always incomplete, ceaselessly yearns for more. One can always be better than one is. In one of her dialogues with God, Gertrude is led to see herself not only as a child of God, but the lowest child of all (18.1). Yet, she is still His child, and despite—or rather because—she is at the bottom, she is dear to her Father, the Father of us all. The “most worthless” and the “most useless” (20.1), she is loved all the more.
In fact, Gertrude is not at all unique: thankfully, we are all at the bottom. How can one possibly be worthy of the infinite? When we try to compare ourselves to God, the finite, rational orderings with which we are habituated fail to apply. Since there is an infinite distance between any one of us and God, how can we claim that Gertrude was somehow more distant than others? Was Gertrude infinity + 1 in terms of her inferiority to God? Academic theories aside, no matter how much we try to extend infinity, the result is the same: infinity. It is as if Gertrude, like the rest of us, is a member of a set of values that has no minimum. Paradoxically, each one of us is “the most useless” and “the most unworthy” of all—we are loved precisely because we are at the bottom.
In the end, the Memorial expresses a truth that was not so much deduced as felt. What Gertrude felt was not so much the expression of a factual claim—“I am the lowest of them all”—as a visceral realization of the infinite distance between her and her Father, a distance bridgeable only through Love, not the image thereof.
4. Humility and Love
Reading the Memorial gives one the impression that Saint Gertrude is always reminding us that God’s love is the only reality essential to us. Without it, we are nothing, or next to nothing. We are in the truest sense insofar as we dismantle our false selves and constructed identities and, by virtue of humility, fully open ourselves to Christ’s presence. Humility frees us from whatever prisons we have made for ourselves.
Given this, humility is a prerequisite for fully receiving Love, Love being another name for God: one must be empty of oneself before one can be truly open to Him. Granted, we are loved in any case, but we, like Narcissus, are likely to be blind to Love if we are self-absorbed.
Near the end of the Memorial, Gertrude describes a key moment in which God ended her vanity:
… at twilight of that day after Compline, during the night of that aforementioned disturbance, you, the true Light shining in darkness, also ended for me the day of girlish vanity, obscured by the darkness of spiritual ignorance. For in that hour … you were present to me, in a most affectionate reconciliation associating me with your knowledge and love, and leading me into my inmost depths, which before that hour was very unknown to me … (23.5).
Gertrude was led by God not to something external, something “out there” in the world, but to her inmost depths. This is how she was freed from vanity, a freedom which yielded a “sweet union and uniting sweetness” with God (2.2). This union was the result of a “honey-flowing vision” (21.1):
… from your divine eyes I perceived through my eyes an inestimable, sweet light entering, which, passing through all my interior, seemed to work in all my limbs a power beyond measure; first, as it were, emptying all the marrow of my bones, then also annihilating the bones themselves together with the flesh to such an extent that my whole substance was felt to be nothing other than that divine splendor which, playing in itself in a delight beyond what can be said, presented to my soul an inestimable joy … (21.3)
So powerful was this love that Gertrude writes that God “melted her soul” with “affectionate caresses” (23.8)—her heart, once made callous by vainglory and indifference, was opened to a form of love that is both intimate and limitless.
The Memorial parallels the writings of other medieval visionaries who expressed their relation to God in the tradition of Minnemystik, Love Mysticism. For example, a near-contemporary of Gertrude, Hadewijch of Brabant (fl. c. 1230–1250), writes that God consumes “especially His handmaids” within Himself—they possess each other in “mutual delight, mouth in mouth, heart in heart, body in body, soul in soul … they both become one through each other …” (Beguine Spirituality, 108).
In the same vein, Saint Mechthild of Magdeburg (c. 1207–1282) writes:
Lord, you are my lover,
My longing,
My flowing stream,
My sun,
And I am your reflection. (Beguine Spirituality, 55)
Similarly, Gertrude writes that God “inhabits her heart,” where she enjoys Him in nuptial bliss as “a queen with a king” (23.6). At the same time, God’s love is merciful; she writes: “let your mercies with which your overflowing love has enfolded me … attest to you, O my sweetest lover!” (23.1).
As a whole, the Memorial gives us the impression that to the extent that God’s love is erotic, it is merciful. At the same time, humility is the key that opens the door to such love. Eros, mercy, and humility blend into one in Gertrude’s “inmost depths” (23.5), as if they were woven together into her heart.
At first glance, Gertrude’s expressions of love may appear as sublimated eroticism. However, her words express an eroticism that is not natural but supernatural—i.e., it is above nature. This way of reasoning, which may seem alien to modern readers, was familiar to ancient philosophers. In his last dialogue, the Laws, Plato writes that the body is a likeness of the soul—the immortal soul, not the body, is the real self (959a–b). In Plato’s Timaeus, it is stated that time itself is an image of eternity (37d). Likewise, we may argue that human love, in all its forms, is not Love itself but an image of Love.
It is easy to assume that since God’s love is perfect and since erotic love is, like nature, imperfect, the two must be mutually exclusive. But this would be to confuse Eros, a mode or species of God’s love, with its images. In line with Plato and the tradition of Minnemystik, we may argue the contrary: insofar as the human body is shaped by Eros, its shape is a tracing of a reality that is divine. Eros is not determined by human desire, but the other way around—this is vividly illustrated in Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s chapel sculpture, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1652).
Again, Christian literature helps us gain a deeper understanding of Gertrude’s experiences. In this case, the difference between Eros and its reflections in the earthly plane, between Love itself and its felt manifestations, was recognized in the literature of the Middle Ages. This is evident in the Christian poem Pearl (c. 1400). Here, in a heavenly vision, the protagonist encounters his lost beloved, his “pearl,” who had passed away early in childhood. He is dismayed to learn that not only is she married to Christ, but Christ is married to thousands of others. In response, his “pearl” states that each sinless soul is a wife adored by Christ, with each wife adding to the bliss of heavenly marriage:
Among us comes neither struggle nor strife.
But though each one is single—would we were five—
The more the merrier, so God me bless;
In company great our love does thrive
In greater honor and never the less. (Pearl, lines 848–852)
Heavenly wives love without limit. Even if Christ had five times as many brides, love and honor would only be increased—“the more the merrier.” We who have fully succumbed to modern thought, puritanical in our own ways, might dismiss this as absurdly polygamous and a degradation of love. Similarly, we might easily misunderstand the erotic language of Gertrude, Hadewijch, and Mechthild. In general, that which is holy in Christian terms is often taboo in secular terms. The love that Gertrude expresses is a form of love that is far removed from whatever counts as “love” in the strictly secular sense.
Today, we who adopt the “enlightened” stance of science and secular thought tend to believe that love should be equitable: one owes the other only what is due. Love is something that must be earned, as if our romantic relations are determined by double-entry accounting, prenuptial contracts, and spreadsheets of debits and credits. Our legal frameworks, our achievements, our positions, our titles, our social worth, not our humility, constitute the basis of our relations.
As for Eros, we like to believe it is a force that we can summon at will, having been informed in the ways of biomechanics and physical reproduction. Yet, love in which humility plays no role, in which God’s mercy has been concealed by vanity, is a shadow of Love. This shadow, while useful in its own ways, ultimately blinds us.
5. Conclusion
Near the end of the Memorial, Saint Gertrude states that while her words fail to explain (“non sinit me hoc verbis exponere”), she would be remiss to remain silent—her writing is needed as an aid to memory lest she forget her visions and the gifts of her Father (22.1). Far from reproducing her revelations, her words can only convey hints or traces of them.
For example, throughout the Memorial, Gertrude refers to God as an “abyss” (“abyssus”)—e.g., God is the “abyss of uncreated wisdom” (1.1). The idea of an abyss contrasts sharply with clear-cut, analytical concepts of God. Such concepts may trick us into thinking that God can be comprehended, as if He were a being that can be fully incorporated into human thought. But an abyss connotes something so vast and boundless that we cannot know it. When we believe that we fully comprehend God, as if He were something that fits neatly into the conclusion of a mathematical deduction, then we have overstepped our limits.
For Gertrude, abyss connotes not nothingness but plenitude; modern readers may find this confusing, given the connotations of the word. T.S. Eliot’s poetic drama, The Family Reunion, sheds light on the distinction between nothingness and being, between the void and the abyss. When the protagonist, talking with the family doctor, reflects on the absence of his father—an absence that began long ago in his youth—he states:
I hardly remember him …
… but in some way or
another
We felt that he was always here.
But when we would have grasped for him, there was
only a vacuum
Surrounded by whispering aunts … (II.i)
Here, the absent human father may serve as an analogy for the Divine Father. We may have an intimation that the Father “is always here,” but when we try to grasp Him, we may find nothing more than empty abstractions, or a sense of nothingness, of our own failure to comprehend—“the circle of our understanding / Is a very restricted area” (II.iii). In the background, there may be murmurings of a presence that was once keenly felt—these are but traces when faith weakens. Rather than blame ourselves, over the years we may gradually begin to believe that He is not with us, and this “not” becomes unbelief—in place of the Father is a void, the shadow of a presence woven into a sense of nothingness. If, in time, despair supplants faith, then our imago, our pride, fills the void.
For Gertrude, however, the abyss signifies not a void but its opposite: a reality which is immense and life-giving. For readers familiar with the ancient cultural foundations of Christianity, Gertrude’s words evoke not the Deep of Genesis 1:2—something distinct from God—but Egyptian creation traditions that describe primordial, boundless depths from which creation springs. Ancient beliefs are typically overlooked precisely because they run deep in the history of human thought.
Though the image of an abyss recurs throughout the Memorial, Gertrude also describes God in ways that are concrete and human. He appears to her as a father, an infant, a lover, a bridegroom, a young man, even as a man who is utterly destitute. Gertrude writes that “both the vision itself, and also the embrace and the kiss” are tailored by God in a way that is most fitting “for the place, the time, and the person” (21.4).
The analogy of a father and his child clarifies this as well. How does a father teach a child who only knows the rudiments of language? He reduces the conversation to the child’s level through words that are at least partially grasped. Similarly, why do we choose the most basic shapes—triangles, squares, circles—when we teach the elements of geometry? To extend the analogy, why do we choose primary colors when we teach small children? These colors have a certain affective power, just as certain shapes and words have emotional power. As children study color, they may learn that black is the absence of visible light. In time, they may be told what seems to be a contradiction: black is not an absence but a presence, insofar as we perceive it.
In fact, the analogy of parent-child communication ultimately fails, given that both the child and the father are human. With God the difference is infinite and humanly unbridgeable; hence, we can expect Him to cross the gap in ways that are contrary to our expectations, ways that seem paradoxical or nonsensical. Here, too, humility is instrumental—passages that seem contradictory in Gertrude’s writing may merely be different ways of expressing the same reality, a reality which is outside the circle of our understanding.
In the concluding chapter of the Memorial, Gertrude writes that she hopes the reader will be “drawn into their inmost depths” where they may experience greater mysteries (24.1). In this sense, we may think of the Memorial as a map: useful if it leads one in the right direction—i.e., into oneself—but useless if it is treated as a destination unto itself. If, as Eliot suggests in Four Quartets, words constitute “a raid on the inarticulate,” then writing is an endeavor that is bound to be incomplete (“East Coker,” V). If, as Eliot also states in the same poem, “humility is endless,” why assume that we are humble enough to fully understand Gertrude? In the Memorial, Gertrude’s revelations are the key. If we want to understand her, we should follow in her footsteps by looking inward, her words serving as breadcrumbs—home is where the heart is.
Acknowledgment: I wish to thank Father Joseph MacNeill of Saint Thomas More Chapel (New Haven, Connecticut) for clarifying the relation between humility and God’s love, for bringing Bernini’s sculpture to my attention, and especially for his assistance with translating Latin passages in the Memorial.
