Hadewijch of Antwerp Quotes on Love
Hadewijch of Antwerp, the thirteenth-century Flemish Beguine mystic, produced one of the most demanding bodies of medieval writing on love, and the quotes gathered here present its themes. For Hadewijch love is known only from within love itself, since love alone gives the knowledge that love is, so that the highest knowledge is not detached contemplation but the experience of loving. She held that a life without love is not yet truly life, and that the soul comes home in love only when it has learned to be a stranger to everything else, surrendering all lesser attachments. Hadewijch did not flinch from love's cost, teaching that pain rightly borne is the very door through which love enters. These formulations, distilled from her Letters, Visions, and Songs, are marked as attributed. They present love as the way by which the soul both knows and loses itself in God.
Quotes
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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:
“Where God is the lover, the soul can hide nothing from God or from itself.”
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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.