Mystical Experience and Transgression: Mechthild von Magdeburg and God’s Eroticism

Abstract

The article starts from the connection between sexuality and mystical experience and goes on to analize the transgressive potential – transgression understood here as the overcoming of a boundary, in this case the boundary of the own identity and the own body – in Mechthild von Magdeburg’s Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit. This transgressive potential becomes a reality in the attempt to subvert the body/spirit dichotomy found in a large part of medieval theology, and therefore to overcome the taboo associated with the female body. However, Mechthild’s insistence on corporeity is really an insistence on the word; on the word made flesh and manifested in Christ’s body. This finally leads to the creation of a new language that is inherently transgressive.