Michel Foucault’s 1984 essay, “What is enlightenment?”[1] requires readers to keep in view how epistemology and ontology—knowing and being—converge in the subject. Knowledge is the being of the self; knowledge constitutes the self as a knowable entity. To say of myself “I am a writer” or “I am a medievalist” is to describe who I am by indicating knowledge and knowledge practices that have importantly informed my own view of me. Likewise for someone to say “I am a singer,” or “a licensed mechanic,” or “a monk” is to represent a self through types of expertise, modes of practice suggesting certain possible roles in certain possible communities, certain ideas of virtue. The self is surely more than the sum of its parts, but summing the parts is a way of beginning to think about who or what a self is.

Towards the end of his essay, casting forward a description of “historical ontology” as a potential field of inquiry, Foucault lays out three questions that must be addressed:

How are we constituted as subjects of our own knowledge? How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power relations? How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions? (48)

Foucault’s essay is concerned at the outset with Kant’s historical ontology as a turning point of modernity, but his questions here are generated and informed by his study of premodern monastic thought and practices.

In my own study of the lives of medieval religious professionals, I have come to see how knowing the self, constituting the self as subject of knowledge, was a twin project with knowing the will of God for the self. If the object of monastic life was to craft a self as obedient as possible to God’s will, then being informed of the will of God was vital. Monastic writings, especially those with a component of autobiography or memoir, show many ways of seeking evidence for God’s will in regard to the self. The one I want to examine here involves the idea of a divine token written or impressed upon the heart.

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This article first appeared in issue 1 of The Side View Journal. Purchase your own copy here. 

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Writing on the heart is a biblical theme that develops a distinctively personal and experiential aspect in the later Middle Ages, driven by affective piety, accompanied by specific prayer practices that were passed from one person to another. In the Bible, “writing on the heart” is associated with the making of a covenant between God and his faithful in three well-known locations: Jeremiah 31:33: “this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel, after those days, saith the Lord: I will give my law in their bowels, and I will write it in their heart.” The passage is paraphrased in Hebrews 8:10: “I will give my laws in their hearts and on their minds will I write them,” and again, using similar words, in Hebrews 10:16, in which it becomes a New Covenant symbol. Another important locus for the heart’s writing is Paul’s second letter to Corinthians, 3:2-3:

You are our epistle, written in our hearts, which is known and read by all men: Being manifested, that you are the epistle of Christ, ministered by us, and written: not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God: not in tables of stone but in the fleshly tables of the heart.

Here, Paul imagines Christ himself as a writing on the human heart: a writing that is divine (written “not with ink but with the Spirit”) but at the same time embodied in human action (“ministered by us”). Writing on the heart is thus associated with the word made flesh as enacted by human beings.

In the introduction to his monograph The Book of the Heart,[2]  Eric Jager comments that “the most personal and individualized of all fleshly ‘books’ of the Passion was the believer’s own heart inscribed with the story of Christ’s suffering. As a devotional ‘text,’ the book of the heart was eminently private, portable, and permanent” (108). But how are such internal “books” actually made? My evidence suggests that they are made through acts of prayer and through repeated acts of writing, viewing, and/or uttering certain words, and so making them a more physical part of memory; through repeated action God’s word is inscribed internally not with ink (or at least not only with ink) but with the spirit.

In what follows, I reflect on how medieval religious professionals were constituted as subjects of their own knowledge by using two exemplary cases deploying this biblical theme of inscription on the heart. I am interested in the context of practices by which writing on the heart is transmitted from the divine to the human, and then from one human to another—both motions by which knowledge of God’s will for the self is established for an individual and passed on to others. I confine myself to two first-person accounts of such inscription in the memoirs of professional religious flourishing between the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries: the German Benedictine nun Gertrude of Helfta (d. ca. 1302) and the German Dominican Friar Henry Suso (d. ca. 1366). Both are invested in practices aimed at realizing closeness to God. As in its biblical precedents, the writing on the heart in these first person stories has contractual aspects: it forges a new covenant between God and the seeker, a very personal one, but also one meant to be made public: for this writing is meant to be replicated.

God’s Blood as Ink: Inner Stigmata in Gertrude of Helfta

In her autobiographical work, the Herald of Divine Love, Gertrude of Helfta is explicit that the internality signified by the “heart” is a place where the soul resides, though she says that she learned from Christ directly, and subsequently from the scriptures, that the soul resides in the brain too. She describes the body as a cloud or darkness around the soul; suffering is seen as salvific because it is capable of admitting into this darkness a kind of light.[3] Generally in Gertrude’s writing, the heart signifies both a bodily internality and a place of conscious sensation.

In the episode I focus on below, in Chapter 4 of Book II, Gertrude describes the “inscription” of stigmata on her heart after the repeated internal recitation of a prayer. This episode comes into an ongoing sequence of visitations by Christ. She describes finding a short prayer in a book that pleased her so much she repeated it often with great fervor. She transcribes for her readers the whole prayer, of which I quote here only the petition:

Inscribe with your precious blood, most merciful Lord, your wounds on my heart that I may read in them both your sufferings and your love. May the memory of your wounds ever remain in the hidden places of my heart, to stir up within me your compassionate sorrow, so that the flame of your love may be enkindled in me (53).

After a time, she felt the prayer was answered. She describes the “inscription” of stigmata:

while I was devoutly meditating on these things, I felt, in my extreme unworthiness, that I had received supernaturally the favors for which I had been asking in the words of the prayer I spoke of. I knew in my spirit that I had received the stigmata of your adorable and venerable wounds interiorly in my heart, just as though they had been made on the natural places of the body (54).

It might be possible for someone reading quickly to think that this “inscription” indicates a physical event; however her words really suggest the opposite—while the act of repeating the prayer is physical, the “knowledge” is not. It came to her “in spirit”; the very wounds of the stigmata could have occurred “just as though” made on the “natural” body only because, unlike St Francis, she did not receive these wounds on her body at all. She elaborates further on the secondary gift of reading:

Did I not receive of the overflowing of your generous love another remarkable gift? On any one day that I recited five verses of the psalm “Bless the Lord, O my soul” (ps. 102) while venerating in spirit the marks of your love impressed on my heart, I cannot claim that I was ever denied some special grace (54).

She describes how she was able to associate each verse of the psalm with a specific wound and grace—she has received a gift of exegesis, of spiritual intelligence—though she says this gift was granted for a short time only, and that she lost it “through her own ingratitude”; nevertheless she preserved the impression of Christ’s wounds on her heart for her entire life. So the gift of “inscription,” and the gift of “reading” Christ’s suffering and love, are separate gifts, one lost, one retained, through actions and mistakes made by Gertrude in her devotional collaboration with God. What seems clear is that she values these gifts at least in part because of the actual understanding that emerged from them. The divine transmission is achieved by God, facilitated by Gertrude.

There is also a human transmission in this written description. The memoir itself obviously served to teach these practices to readers, but it is notable that the prayer used by Gertrude here is also extracted from her writing for use in other late medieval collections of prayers, and is passed on separately from the memoir. It gains power by its association with her; the written prayer is an external replication of, as well as practical auxiliary for, the inscribed heart its recitation encourages.

Spiritual Lettering That Really Bleeds: Henry Suso

Of my two exemplary characters, the one most known for extreme asceticism is the Dominican Henry Suso. His memoir tells how he inscribed God’s name (in the form of the monogram IHC) over his heart with a “sharp stylus,” calling the resulting wound and scar a “love token.” After scarring over, he claimed the letters sometimes radiated light, in a further experiential and phenomenal reminder of his own personal pact with God.

As with Gertrude, the act of inscription is embedded in a ritual context; prayers attend this act of bodily modification both before and after, as he describes it:

[He] bared his breast, and took a stylus in hand. Looking at his heart, he said, “God of power, give me today strength and power to carry out my desire, for today you shall be engraved in the ground of my heart.” And he began to jab into the flesh above his heart, with the stylus . . . back and forth, up and down, until he had drawn the name IHS right over his heart. Because of the sharp stabs blood poured profusely from his flesh . . . After he had done this, he went exhausted and bleeding from his cell to the pulpit under the crucifix. Kneeling down he said: . . . “My Lord, I do not know how to press you into me further, nor can I; alas, Lord, I beg you to finish this by pressing yourself further into the ground of my heart, and so draw your holy name onto me, that you never again leave my heart.”[4] 

Like Gertrude, Henry here requests an inscription on the heart; his own act is but in token of his interest in the work he asks God to do, a lettering to be fulfilled by God’s desire.

One might wonder how he can recommend such practices to others; in fact he does not, but offers a kind of substitute for his radical self-inscription. At the end of Henry’s memoir, a novice, named only as “the daughter,” requests that he sum up his theological teachings. In answer, Henry asks her to imagine rings expanding outward from a stone flung into water:

Now consider the first circle to be an image of the might of the divine nature in the Father. This immeasurable power produces a second circle like itself, in the form of a Person which is the Son, and these two produce a third, which is the Spirit of them both, equally eternal and equally omnipotent . . . In this deep abyss the divine nature is present in the Father speaking and giving birth to the Son. . . . Now if you want to imagine this, think of the form of a man. Out of the innermost depths of his heart there springs forth this same form in such a way that it constantly gazes back upon it. This spiritual birth . . . leads all things and spirits forth into their natural existence (201).

Here, the “heart” becomes the compass point of the circle “whose center is everywhere”; the whole human realm is linked to God through this heart, from which springs forth the human form, gazing always back upon his own heart. For Henry, one might say, the Jesus monogram on his chest is like a heart graven upon a heart—a reminder of the eternal center to which he keeps his gaze turned back. By corollary, the heart in this suite of images links God profoundly to the self of the servant through the heart, where God operates in the human and through him or her outward into the Christian community.

In his later Latin work of devotional instruction, the Horologium Sapientiae, Henry comments on the devotional efficacy of inscriptions of Jesus’s name, counseling other people not in carving letters into their own chests, in fact, but instead carrying the name of God, written out and concealed secretly on their persons to fix the memory of God’s work, through sight and touch to keep them conscious of their love for God.[5]  He compares the written name to other signs of God’s covenant that give it a physical form, like the rainbow, and like the sons of Israel who “set up visible marks, either building altars or erecting stones, so that by outward signs fallible human memory might be helped” (322). Henry’s readers had a strong interest in the Jesus monogram, replicating it as he suggests, not merely for carrying on their person, but as a marker in manuscripts of the vita. In an interesting manuscript, in the Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg MS 2929, the IHC monogram is deployed in many places and in different manners in the text; and whenever Henry Suso is depicted, he is marked with the monogram on his chest.

Conclusions

For the medieval religious writers whose memoirs are discussed here, physical ritual and devotional practices are used to intensify and realize the memory of a biblical text through repeated writing and utterance. Both Henry and Gertrude aim to reify textual knowledge by linking scriptural loci about the heart to their own hearts personally. Later, in both cases, specific tried-and-true prayer practices aimed at this goal become others’ property, passed from the author of each memoir to his or her surrounding community. The internal scripture thus can be imagined to move through the community heart by heart, imprinting willing recipients with the marks of divine love. In each case, the invitation to God to inscribe his autograph on the singular heart of a willing subject has far ranging effects when God answers the invitation positively, from the sudden holistic understanding of the meaning of scripture, to bodily radiations, to other visionary and miraculous kinds of infused knowledge.

Returning to Foucault’s historical ontology and the idea of how we are constituted as subjects of our own knowledge, I would underscore the radical way scripture is enabled to impress medieval religious subjects, offering ways of making God integral to their constitution of self. The memoirs and practices discussed here are products of a specific social context and historical moment, but what I would emphasize for readers here is that we should not leap to make a too hasty distinction between knowledge that is “merely” textual and knowledge that is embodied in ritual ways. Any reading is capable of radically transforming the person, especially the reading that repeats itself over and over. This is true not just when its content is prayer, because the writers discussed here are passing on experiences via memoir and in Suso’s case via sermons and books of devotional instruction as well.

All practices are embodied practices, necessarily so, however merely intellectual or inactive they appear (I count as embodied sitting quietly and thinking, sleeping, dreaming or day dreaming, writing books, or repetitive tossing about of memes on the internet). Books—the object form of the text, the textual body, if you will—are a material result of the embodied practice of writing them. Certainly some texts are given more power than others by the communities that hold the texts dear; but all texts may contribute to the subject formation of those who read and meditate on them. Textual bodies are contiguous with embodied texts.

[1]  In The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (NY: Pantheon Books, 1984): 32-50.

[2] Book of the Heart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

[3] Gertrude of Helfta, Herald of Divine Love, trans. Margaret Winkworth (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1993), chapter 15, 68-9.

[4] From Suso’s “Life of the Servant,” chapter 5; quoted from The Examplar, trans. Frank Tobin (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1989), 70-71.

[5] Wisdom’s Watch upon the Hours, trans Edmund Colledge (Washington D.C.: CUA Press, 1994). 322.