Hadewijch of Antwerp Quotes
Hadewijch of Antwerp was a thirteenth-century Flemish Beguine mystic and philosopher, leader of a small community of beguines in the Low Countries, and the author of one of the most original and demanding bodies of mystical philosophical writing in any medieval vernacular. Her Letters, Visions, and Songs in Middle Dutch articulate a philosophy of love in which the soul, in radical exposure to the divine beloved, comes to know itself only by surrendering itself, and in which the highest knowledge is achieved not by ascetic withdrawal but by entering wholly into the suffering and the joy of love. The quotes below are attributed to Hadewijch of Antwerp, organized by topic.
Browse Hadewijch of Antwerp by topic
Hadewijch of Antwerp on God
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Attributed to Hadewijch of Antwerp:
“Where God is the lover, the soul can hide nothing from God or from itself.”
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“Jane Hirshfield, ed., Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women .”
The Mengeldichten (Poems in Couplets) 25-29
Hadewijch of Antwerp on Knowledge
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“And in this unity into which I was taken and where I was enlightened, I understood this Being and knew it more clearly than, by speech, reason, or sight, one can know anything that is knowable on earth”
Letters | Letter XVII. -
“All things are too small to hold me, I am so vast In the Infinite I reach for the Uncreated I have touched it, it undoes me wider than wide Everything else is too narrow You know this well, you who are also there.”
The Mengeldichten (Poems in Couplets) 25-29
Hadewijch of Antwerp on Love
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Attributed to Hadewijch of Antwerp:
“Love alone gives the knowledge that love is.”
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Attributed to Hadewijch of Antwerp:
“She who lives without love does not yet know what it is to live.”
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Attributed to Hadewijch of Antwerp:
“The soul is at home in love when it has learned to be a stranger to everything else.”
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Attributed to Hadewijch of Antwerp:
“Pain rightly borne is the very door through which love enters.”
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“They who stand ready to content Love are also eternal and unfathomable. For their conversation is in heaven, and their souls follow everywhere their Beloved who is unfathomable”
P. Mommaers, Hadewijch: Writer, Beguine, Love Mystic , p. 82.
Hadewijch of Antwerp on Time
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“In the intimacy of the One, Those souls are pure and inwardly naked, without images, without figures, As if liberated from time, uncreated, Freed from their limits in silent latitude”
The Mengeldichten (Poems in Couplets) 17-24 | Mengeldichten 17, in A History of Women in the West: Silences of the Middle Ages , p. 478.