absolute essence of the suffering

mystic: the visions of elisabeth

of schönau

Jeffrey Butcher
George Washington University

abstract

The practices of the suffering mystic provide an opposition to the theory that religion
is the alienation of the individual from the self. In this article, I argue that the spiri-
tual autobiography of Elisabeth of Schönau affords us the opportunity to challenge
notions of religious self-alienation. By examining the self-inflicted suffering described
in Elisabeth’s visions, I propose that imitations of the Passion of Christ illustrate a prac-
tice that allowed the mystic to (re)gain what I call the “absolute essence” of the self—the
rejection of any sort of self-alienation, a place where the subject and object are one. As
the interest in the Passion grew in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the narratives of
Elisabeth’s mystical experiences appropriately demonstrate how self-mortification was a
means to self-representation.
keywords: Elisabeth of Schönau, medieval mysticism, subject/pain theory, spiritual
autobiography, the suffering Christ

introduction: absolute essence

Devotional literature of the eleventh and twelfth centuries marks the

increase and evolution of the “first-person singular.” As Sarah McNamer
asserts, the topic of the first-person singular—the autobiographical and
impassioned “I” of Augustine’s Confessions, which twelfth-century writers
began to imitate—is underexplored and deserves far more attention.
McNamer emphasizes that “at stake are complex issues in the history of
subjectivity,” including deeper comprehensions of personhood and indi-
viduality.1 Matters pertaining to the rise of the individual directly implicate
the essence of the self, and narratives of the suffering female mystic afford

journal of medieval religious cultures, Vol. 40, No. 2, 2014

Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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the opportunity to further examine these issues. This is particularly true of

mystics who willfully suffered by imitating the Passion of Christ. Not only
is suffering in essence a personal experience, but the will to endure pain
by imitating Christ’s suffering demonstrates autonomy over the individual
self. In this article, I argue that imitating the Passion of Christ provided a
model for medieval mystics to reach what I term absolute essence.2
Absolute essence signifies the rejection of any sort of self-alienation,
whether physical or spiritual. The term has Kantian and Hegelian roots,
comparable to the thing-in-itself and species-being, but provides an alter-
native to post-Enlightenment theories that assert an individual becomes
alienated from the self through religious practices.3 Absolute essence specifi-
cally deals with the human self and denotes the completeness of the indi-
vidual, in that the individual possesses the inclusive properties of subject
and object. The mystical union inherently resists the binary opposition of
subject/object. Accounts of the mystic’s suffering confront, and essentially
reject, self-alienation as they illustrate that the practical path to complete
consciousness of one’s being—a place where subject and object unite—
may be demonstrated through active and spiritual pain. Even for modern
critics who all too readily accept the theory that religion is the product
of mankind giving up its subjective nature to a being other than itself, it
should be understood that the mystic’s efforts to move closer to an external
being means that the mystic is attempting to unite with her creator. Thus,
identifying with Christ, the embodiment of humanity and divinity, exem-
plifies a process whereby the mystic (re)gains her essential individual traits,
thus averting self-alienation and achieving absolute essence.
Although there are certainly more thoroughly studied mystics who
viewed the Passion as a means to share the suffering of Christ, I focus on
the visions of Elisabeth of Schönau.4 Elisabeth’s visions show a twelfth-
century mystic who practices objective, humble acts of ascetic devotion.
Elisabeth (1129 –1165) entered the Benedictine monastery of Schönau at the
young age of twelve. The only information we have about her life comes
from her book of revelations and letters.5 Elisabeth’s visions did not begin
until around the age of twenty-three, but her records suggest that she began
to experience extreme suffering and illness shortly after joining the mon-
astery. Elisabeth’s visions, as Anne L. Clark suggests, differ from those of
her contemporaries in that “her experiences are interactive; she reacts to
what she sees or hears; she questions the meaning of her visions and learns
more in so doing; she describes herself meditating on previous visions and
she breaks forth in unguarded response to what she sees.”6 The interactive

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nature of Elisabeth’s autobiographical voice makes her a central figure

when examining mystic individuality.
Elisabeth’s visions ultimately granted her individual agency and legiti-
mized her role in the monastic community and the religious community
at large. Her narratives, however, are not her exact utterances. Her brother
Ekbert acted as her secretary, mediating the transcriptions of her visions.
The visions are spoken from memory and perhaps influenced by Ekbert,
so we do not have access to Elisabeth’s original words. Because Clark notes
that the earliest texts were least subject to Ekbert’s influence, as these texts
tend to focus more on Elisabeth rather than her revelations,7 I place more
emphasis on Book I. I also want to emphasize that the narratives are told
from the first-person point of view, and it is Elisabeth’s autobiographical
voice that is provided throughout the texts. I suggest that speaking from
memory provides Elisabeth with the personal autonomy to (re-)create her
own visions. Additionally, the possibility of variation makes Elisabeth’s
visions even more attractive and credible, in that more people are attentive
to and influenced by Elisabeth’s messages; because the words are attrib-
uted to Elisabeth, it is clear that she has an overpowering authority that
reaches others. Elisabeth’s valorized reputation as a visionary also shows
her to be reliable, and her reliability made her an extremely prominent
figure during the twelfth century; her visions were accessed by members of
the clergy, secular leaders, and the public. Elisabeth’s fame spread outside
of the community of Schönau and reached beyond the borders of Germany;
her works were very well received in England and France.8
Even though Elisabeth was well known during the medieval period,
she is greatly underrepresented in current medieval mystical scholarship.
She is most commonly observed through her relationship with Hildegard
of Bingen. Barbara Newman suggests that the reason for this neglect is
that “we tend to value mysticism insofar as it represents the uniquely per-
sonal, anomalous, and subversive elements in religion; we prize the heroic
achievements of individuals, and especially their resistance to oppressive
authorities.”9 To this end, I suggest that it is precisely Elisabeth’s strict
devotion to Christ through a lack of resistance and subversion that makes
her spiritual autobiography uniquely personal and reflective of the journey
toward absolute essence.
In Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation,
Leigh Gilmore determines that “mystical (self-)representation insists upon
the simultaneous presence of Christ’s body in the mystic’s and the mys-
tic’s body in Christ’s.”10 Elisabeth understands her pain to be a sign of God

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working in her. The externally and self-inflicted torture and pain result in
the union with Christ and provide her with the agency to break down the
subject/object binary—and to make and unmake the world surrounding
the self. Ultimately, Elisabeth’s episodes with the suffering Christ (Christ
on the crucifix, Christ immediately following the Crucifixion, and stories
of the Passion read to her in times of affliction) during her trances epito-
mize her transcendence of the human self and her interconnection with
the absolute and, to this end, reveal an attainment of absolute essence.11

suffering, pain, and the individual

According to Rachel Fulton, the practical and sensuous activities of mys-

tics were geared toward the Passion of Christ in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries. While most medieval scholarship recognizes that compassion
for the suffering Christ emerged in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
Fulton identifies the eleventh and twelfth centuries as markers for the initial
phases of affective compassion.12 McNamer builds on Fulton’s findings by
maintaining that women played a crucial role in the turn to affective com-
passion through their presumed association with the carnal body: because
women were considered to represent the carnal more than men, women
could “identify more fully than men with the incarnate Christ, feeling his
physical suffering as their own.”13 In fact, as has been examined by Caroline
Walker Bynum, many female mystics in the thirteenth century identified
the suffering body of Christ with the female body.14 Elisabeth’s visions sub-
stantiate this as the Lord identifies His humanity with the female. When
Elisabeth asks the Lord about the virgin “crowned with the most splendid
gold and holding a golden cup in her right hand,” He responds, “The vir-
gin you see is the sacred humanity of the Lord Jesus. The sun in which
the virgin is sitting is the divinity that possesses and illuminates the whole
humanity of the Savior.”15 By sharing the essence of the female body with
Christ, Elisabeth’s suffering is even more akin to shared divinity.
Self-inflicted pain may seem like an excessive means of demonstrat-
ing personal agency, but Laurie A. Finke conceives excess to be the whole
point: “The mystic’s pain—her inflicting wounds upon herself—gave her
the authority to speak and be heard, to have followers, to act as a spiritual
advisor, to heal the sick, and to found convents and hospitals.”16 Self-inflicted
methods of pain included extreme fasting, sleep deprivation, and flogging.
Although extreme fasting and self-flagellation were not always advocated

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 jeffrey butcher 177

or condoned by the medieval Church, they were common practices of

devout ascetics in which Elisabeth excessively partook. According to her
brother Ekbert’s description, Elisabeth’s voluntary affliction resulted in
“gashes in [her] sides caused by [her] hard belt” and “the incredible pau-
city of food.”17 Elisabeth took her suffering to dangerous extremes. Ulrike
Wiethaus points out that Hildegard of Bingen had heard that Elisabeth’s
piety exercises were becoming life-threatening; consequently, in a letter to
Elisabeth, Hildegard says, “O Daughter of God, who calls me, a miserable
form, ‘mother,’ learn constraint!”18 In addition, the refusal to accept treat-
ment for ailments, so that the suffering would increase rather than dimin-
ish, was customary and demonstrative of a personal choice to partake in the
suffering of Christ. In Elisabeth’s case, a voice warns her in a vision “not to
commit [her] body to human remedies but to the will of [her] Creator”; in
effect, she refuses treatments for her ailments.19 She exhibits autonomous
management over the pain she feels by electing not to receive any remedies
from her sisters.
With the exception of allusions to her lack of food intake and sleep,
Elisabeth does not recount her self-inflicted pain in great detail. However,
in her narrative accounts, she does acknowledge her willing participation.
In two continuous visions, Elisabeth is approached by an angel with a scale.
On one side the scale holds a book of transgressions, and on the other, a
book of righteous acts. In the first vision, Elisabeth observes that the book
of transgressions weighs more. Seeing great fear in Elisabeth, an angel
comes to her defense, stating, “It shall not be like this because she has
endured many and great pains for her transgressions and has often under-
taken harsh flagellations.” In the next recorded vision, the book of righ-
teousness is the heavier of the two. However, the angel tells Elisabeth that
she still needs to make her life “more perfect.” Elisabeth responds, “My
lord, what more can I do? Don’t you know my fragility and that I cannot
struggle more than I do?” Elisabeth then says, “Then he instructed me and
exhorted me to a certain bodily mortification that I had often practiced on
myself.”20 It is the flagellations that put her in divine favor and that will ulti-
mately make her “more perfect”; therefore, these acts of self-mortification,
while occurring on a regular basis, illustrate a move toward absolute essence.
According to Elaine Scarry, to be in pain is to be cognizant of the entire
self. In The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Scarry
maintains, “To have great pain is to have certainty”: “The story of physical
pain becomes . . . a story about the expansive nature of human sentience,
the felt-fact of aliveness.”21 Certainty directly opposes self-alienation, and

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the excruciating pain that Elisabeth describes validates Scarry’s theory.

Elisabeth confesses that during her first year in the monastic profession “a
great torment seized my heart. . . . I thought I was close to death.”22 Other
times, Elisabeth claims, “I was seized by a very harsh torment in my heart
in such a way that I thought I was about to die,” and, “I was so pressed
everywhere that no part of my body was not in pain.”23 By recognizing the
interpellation of the binary opposition alive/dead, her “close to death” feel-
ing constitutes her sentience of total aliveness. The pervasiveness of the
pain causes her to be conscious of all parts of her body: “At first the tips of
my hands and feet and then all my flesh began to crawl . . . and my heart
felt as if it were cut in two parts by a sword.”24 Her attentiveness to the body
is indicative of recognition of the absolute self.
If to experience pain is the felt fact of aliveness, the essential state
of total self-sentience, then imitating the suffering of Christ provided a
path for mystics to reach absolute essence, and the corporeal punishment
from which female mystics suffered authorized them to interpret their
own human position in relation to the divine. Elisabeth, although cer-
tain of the self during periods of pain, was unsure how to interpret her
mystic experiences. Uncertain about whether or not she should publicly
disclose the visions, Elisabeth has the agency to contemplate her posi-
tion in the eyes of God: “What do you think people would say about me?
Some perhaps would say I am holy and attribute the grace of God to my
own merits, judging that I am something when I am nothing”; and oth-
ers would say that if she is a servant of God, “she would certainly keep
silent and not allow her own name to be magnified upon the earth.”25
Visions exposing evil spirits and Satan exacerbated her self-doubt, causing
Elisabeth to question whether her suffering actually was punishment or
not.26 The difference between involuntary and voluntary suffering could
be a determining factor of the interpretation. Esther Cohen explains that
involuntary suffering could be interpreted either way — as divine favor or
as punishment. She claims that all pain was believed to have meaning that
could be decoded; for example, “involuntary sufferers could interpret and
diagnose their own illnesses as punishment, as a sign of divine favor, or
as a nuisance and a cause for seeking a cure at the hands of physicians
or saints.”27 But also, as Gilmore explains, mystics had to be careful not
to be considered heretics, so “self-policing” how they communicated
their experiences was crucial.28 Voluntarily welcoming pain, on the other
hand, Elisabeth could visibly and internally exhibit true commitment to

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emulating Christ. Wiethaus stresses, “Given her somewhat unstable and

vulnerable psychological makeup, Elisabeth’s self-mortification might
have functioned as a means to constrain recurring self-doubt and insecu-
rity.”29 If this is the case, Elisabeth’s self-inflicted pain served as a means
to become certain of her essential human state, even if she questioned her
place in the eyes of God. Self-affliction empowered her to consciously imi-
tate divine suffering by taking it upon herself to act in the way she believed
Christ would act upon her.
While Elisabeth exemplifies how self-mortification can be used to reach
the autonomous state of absolute essence, she additionally captures it as a col-
laborative process and an expression of power. The power is used for good,
for divine purposes, supporting Julia Kristeva’s explanation that “one may
only stress the masochistic economy of [the mystic’s infinite] jouissance
only if one points out at once that the Christian mystic, far from using it to
the benefit of a symbolic or institutional power, displaces it indefinitely . . .
within a discourse where the subject is reabsorbed . . . into communication
with the Other and with others.”30
As the subject unites with the Other, the mystic ultimately eradicates
the boundary between subject and object. Welcoming pain indicates an
aspiration to “reabsorb” or “regain” absoluteness. Elisabeth manages
her absolute essence by desiring to liberate lost or troubled souls as Christ
would. For example, one of her abbey sisters died at Dirstein; to relieve
her soul, Elisabeth says that she and her sisters exacted “mortification for
the relief of her soul according to our custom.” Following the customary
act of self-mortification, “the angel was lifted up to her and together they
returned to the heights.”31 In a similar circumstance, three girls are walk-
ing: “one . . . from childhood, the other from adolescence, and the third
from advanced age.” Because these girls are not aided by enough prayers,
they remain unliberated and fearful of “three frightful dogs who constantly
seem to threaten to bite.” They ask whether or not Elisabeth can plead with
her abbey to offer a sacrifice to honor God, which would then free them
from their hardships. Elisabeth says, “When I had disclosed this to our sis-
ters, with devout intent they agreed to undertake together corporeal morti-
fication for them and, having divided the Psalter among themselves, they
prayed to the Lord with great diligence for the liberation of those women.”32
From these two visions, we come to two conclusions about self-inflicted
pain: It is indeed a customary practice, and it allows those who practice it to
serve a divine cause.

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 180 Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures

suffering with christ

The self in its absolute state can further be elucidated by acknowledging the
mystic’s liminal position between the earthly and the heavenly. The liminal
position may be applied to Robert Mills’s theory of “suspended animation.”
The term refers to bodies “‘suspended’ between different temporal zones,
such as those of the hanged on the scaffold, dangling precariously between
heaven and earth; bodies ‘on the verge of’ being dismembered, such as
the ones depicted in secular justice paintings; souls eternally in torment
in hell, always ‘on the brink of’ suffering more; bodies ‘about to’ suffer,
for instance those of Christian martyrs; and bodies such as Christ’s which
find themselves ‘interposed’ symbolically, in the gap between allegorical
and literal interpretation.”33 “Suspended animation” is an especially fitting
term for Elisabeth’s torment. Mills identifies “suspension” with medieval
depictions of Christ hanging on the crucifix—suspended between life and
death, sin and salvation, human and divine. Elisabeth is often situated in
this unbounded position during the Eucharist. Clark puts forth an exposi-
tion of a liminal position when referring to Elisabeth’s participation in the
Eucharist. For Elisabeth, the Eucharist “is an intimate experience—it nour-
ishes her and reveals its true nature to her spiritual eyes. Representing the
moment when the chasm between heaven and earth is bridged, it becomes
the moment when this chasm is likewise bridged through her visionary
experience. Given through the supreme physical suffering of Jesus, it precip-
itates her own physical torment.”34 This position of suspension— bridging
the divine and the earthly—is consistent with absolute essence, whole with
the divine and earthly and thus the self. Understanding Elisabeth to be in
suspension, we see that her suffering shows her to be straddling the divine
and the earthly. She has the agency to dictate her suffering and, on occa-
sions, is cognizant of the self enough to prepare herself for future torment.
Elisabeth says, “With the feast of the Lord’s birth approaching, for two days
before the feast I prepared for my impending suffering.”35 Premonitions of
upcoming pain, especially pain that occurs on the day of the birth of Christ,
emphasize an association with the divine.
Elisabeth’s suspended states may also be recognized through her shift
between torturer and victim, which help us to better comprehend the
subject/object relationship— depicting the interpellation of binary opposi-
tions that results in wholeness. Scarry notes four sets of oppositions con-
sistent with this relationship using the case of a tortured prisoner as an
example. Scarry’s point is about the suffering, and is not limited to the

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subject being a prisoner, and is freely applicable to Elisabeth’s experiences

with pain. Scarry states, “The pain is hugely present to the prisoner and
absent to the torturer; the question is, within the political fiction, hugely
significant to the torturer and insignificant to the prisoner; for the prisoner,
the body and its pain are overwhelmingly present and voice, world, and
self are absent; for the torturer, voice, world, and self are overwhelmingly
present and the body and pain are absent.” She adds that in times of torture,
the victim often feels as if she is self-alienating, self-betraying, and self-
hating.36 If the torturer and the victim are one and the same, as Elisabeth
shows herself to be, then the opposing sides of this binary fuse together.
The body and pain are absent and present, just as voice, world, and self
are absent and present; all sensations and forms of consciousness are felt
through the mutually dependent relationship. So if Elisabeth feels doubt or
uncertainty about her position on earth or about her relationship with God,
being in suspension arguably provides her with absolute certainty, allowing
her to encompass the essence of the self as subject and object.
Appropriately enough, Elisabeth’s trances usually occur when she is in
physical torment, a time when certainty of the self is at its greatest. She
explains, “I had been sick for six days with that languor that usually comes
to be before visions of great things.”37 Comparable to her own physical con-
dition in her great visions, Christ appears in great pain in a great deal of
her visions. On the Annunciation of Mary, Elisabeth sees Christ appear in
the company of “infinite thousands” of saints while He emerges in a state
of just being taken down from the cross:

Around the time of Mass, I began to be most seriously distressed,

and after excessive and miserable sufferings of my body, I went into
a trance and it seemed to me as if my spirit was drawn away from
my body and lifted up on high. Moreover, in that trance, I saw the
heavens open and the Lord Jesus with infinite thousands of saints
coming into the realm of this atmosphere. There was neither beauty
nor comeliness in him; rather, He appeared as pitiable as when He
had just been crucified. And when to the whole world He brandished
the cross on which He had hung, His wounds flowing as if with
fresh blood, He shouted with a great and terrible voice, saying, “Such
things I have endured for you, but what have you endured for me?”38

If she must endure pain for him, she shares, even if only temporarily, a
connection with the divine. Therefore, if any sense of alienation is assumed,

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the formative relationship obliterates any boundary that creates separation,

and Elisabeth reaches absolute essence.
In another vision, she sees Christ “looking as if He was experiencing
great distress. [She] also saw those precious drops of blood running down
from His most holy flesh onto the ground.”39 By using the same descriptive
words pertaining to her own suffering, Elisabeth directly associates herself
with His suffering. In the first vision mentioned above, she pronounces
herself as “seriously distressed,” and in the second vision it is Christ who is
in “great distress.” Her choice of words exemplifies the unity that Elisabeth
claims to have with Christ. Ellen Ross explains that medieval participation
“in the events surrounding Jesus’ suffering and learning to feel and expe-
rience as Christ had felt and experienced, explicitly linked one with the
salvific work of Christ.”40 If the salvific work of Christ is suffering, then an
individual alienated from the human form of God should feel comfort; but,
rather, Elisabeth’s feelings of pain are comparable to those of the divine.
Her association with the divine opposes any sort of alienation, resulting in
the completeness of the self.
In addition to analogous descriptions of pain, sharing characteristics
of Christ may be recognized through bodily functions. Despite initial piti-
able depictions of Christ, Elisabeth’s visions of Christ on the cross some-
times result in a heavenly Lord cleansed and freed from His wounds and
“standing in heavenly brightness.”41 Sweat is typically the cleansing agent,
an agent that the physical body internally possesses. In one of Elisabeth’s
visions, it is not until Christ sweats that Elisabeth sees relief in Him: “His
sweat was like drops of blood flowing down from Him to the ground.”42
Following this period of agony, He is rejuvenated. Likewise, it is through
sweating that Elisabeth becomes replenished. During a period of anguish,
Elisabeth is unable to take any refreshment into her body; but then she
feels a liquid like “a comb of honey” in her mouth and is strengthened as
her body emits “a copious sweat.”43 When Elisabeth suffers for three days
after being whipped by the angel of the Lord, she is “strengthened by a
profuse outpouring of sweat” on the fourth day.44
Along with being cleansed in a fashion similar to Christ, Elisabeth
receives a whipping that mirrors the flogging that Christ endures. In a vision
of the Passion, she sees the Lord “stripped of His garments and whipped by
the impious ones, and in the end nailed to the cross.”45 Like His enemies
struck Him, an angel strikes Elisabeth five times, and Elisabeth explains
that “for three days after this I severely languished throughout my body
because all my flesh had been struck by the harshness of the whip” (until
the profuse sweat relieves her).46 Obviously, there are distinctions between

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Christ’s flogging and that which Elisabeth receives; He is whipped by the

impious ones, while she is whipped for not sharing His Word. However,
the rationale for her punishment, her pain and replenishment, is quite
similar. Her punishment for disobedience reveals her liminal position of
the sufferer, resisting subject/object opposition, and she is in extreme pain
for three days before becoming rejuvenated, reflective of the time between
Christ’s death and resurrection.
Ostensibly, the corporeal imitations of the Passion ultimately lead to
Elisabeth’s transition from an earthly being to sharing the Word of God to
speaking for the Lord. Because, as Ross explains, the “carnal, fleshly under-
standing of Jesus becomes the very source of the manifestation of divine
presence,”47 Elisabeth’s identical wretched condition, embodying His pain,
shows her to possess divine presence through her own affliction. This is
reinforced when she emerges from a trance as if she is Christ:

After a little while, Judas arrived with an armed band and came
forward and kissed the Lord. However, those who were with Judas
retreated and fell to the ground. Then they rose up, caught hold of
Him, and led Him miserably chained to the city. I also saw the dis-
ciples run to their hiding places. Then I returned from ecstasy with
these words, “My friend betrayed Me with the sign of a kiss saying,
‘the one whom I will kiss is the one; take Him.’”48

In another state of ecstasy, Elisabeth is told to reiterate a message by warn-

ing those who do not repent that they will be “tormented in eternal fire.”
When Elisabeth asserts, “Lord, I don’t know how to speak and I am slow of
speech,” Christ responds, “Open your mouth and I will speak, and the one
who hears you, also hears Me.”49 Christ speaks through Elisabeth, quash-
ing the idea of alienation from the divine—thus illustrating the absolute
essence of the human self. Elisabeth develops an authoritative first-person
voice through her experiences with the Passion during her moments of
ecstasy, and it becomes her duty to communicate the Word of God.

suffering and (re)making

Speaking as an instrument for the suffering Christ bestows Elisabeth with

the authority to disseminate divine messages to her audiences. She speaks
in an emphatic manner as if she is the maker of the Word. She shouts
to those at the feast of Mary’s Assumption: “Do not ignore these words

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 184 Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures

because they are profitable to your souls.”50 To make the value of the Word
relatable to her audiences, Elisabeth compares it with material value. She
asserts that the Word of God is “more precious than gold and silver.”51 The
profitable nature of the spiritual Word of God is denoted in material terms
to fit with the material world. An angel asks, “Why do you hide gold in
the mud? This is the word of God, which is sent to earth through your
mouth, not so that it would be hidden, but so that it would be manifest for
the praise and glory of our Lord and for the salvation of His people.”52 If
Elisabeth is the carrier of the divine Word and the divine is understood to
be speaking through her, then she momentarily shares divine nature and
shares in the making and distribution of the divine Word; thus, she encom-
passes the properties of the subject and object of creation.
In his introduction to Book I of Elisabeth’s visions, Ekbert confirms
the soundness of Elisabeth’s connection with divinity through her use of
language.53 Alleging that Elisabeth had little to no skill in speaking Latin,
Ekbert explains that Elisabeth returns from trances to “suddenly utter in
Latin certain very divine words that she had never learned from anyone else
and that she could not have made up herself.”54 Rather than God being a
self-alienating projection, the divine is projected onto her. She is said to be
inhabited by a divine being; it takes this affiliation with a divine being—
the suffering Christ—for her to be able to familiarize her experience of
suffering.
Ultimately, through her suffering and her visions, Elisabeth’s world is
unmade, just to be made again. This is the point of self-implemented suf-
fering: “To unmake the human body by mortifying the flesh is to remake it
in the image of Christ in his Passion.”55 Scarry asserts that for the suffering
subject, the external world ultimately becomes unmade because language
is destroyed.56 In multiple visions, Elisabeth loses the ability to speak. She
tells her brother, “I began to suffer and be oppressed beyond all measure
in such a way that I could not speak to anyone.”57 Her silence, because
language is obsolete, reflects the unmaking of the world. But it is just
the earthly world that is unmade; suffocating in her pain, she crosses the
boundary into the divine world by feeling the pain that Christ feels. When
“paralysis subdued even my tongue,” Elisabeth explains, the mind steps up
to retain the content of the visions: “I fulfilled with my mind the duty of
my tongue.”58 The body itself is part of the whole of the mind’s reality—the
self takes on properties of the subject and object, spiritual and physical. In
regards to religious suffering, Scarry explains, “The self-flagellation of the

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religious ascetic, for example, is not (as is often asserted) an act of denying
the body, eliminating its claims from attention, but a way of so empha-
sizing the body that the contents of the world are cancelled and the path
is clear for the entry of an unworldly, contentless force.”59 Such a claim
takes for granted the fact that an entry of an unworldly, contentless force
presupposes the exit of the unworldly, contentless force—which means
that the worldly must be (re-)created.
Essentially, when pain leaves the body, the world is remade for the
individual through memory and the imagination, and the world is remade
for others as the vision is communicated with comprehendible language.
Scarry assesses that “while pain is a state remarkable for being wholly
without objects, the imagination is remarkable for being the only state
that is wholly its objects.”60 The complete referential core of the imagina-
tion allows the individual to make up the world around her, a place for
her made body to exist again. She who suffers from the pain becomes the
maker — individually and collectively — thus the mystic makes the earthly
and the otherworldly real. Gilmore outlines two different takes on the
recitation of traumatic experiences: “Language may merely record trauma
even as its figural properties and the speaker’s imagination threaten to
contaminate the trauma’s historical purity. In another view, trauma, it is
claimed, does not exist until it can be articulated and heard by a sympa-
thetic listener. This [second] view swings to the other extreme to claim that
without language, experience is nothing.”61 In regards to the first view,
whether “contaminated” or not, I think that we need to focus on the fact
that the suffering mystic still narrates what is part of her mind, which at
that point is an authentic description of the trauma. This especially applies
to Elisabeth speaking from memory. Even if it is just supposed as real,
the mystic is taking on the role of an autonomous self by reiterating the
vision. The second view described by Gilmore is even more applicable
and speaks to Elisabeth, in that she talks about Christ’s pain and then
her own. For the pain to become manifest, the sisters must be exposed to
it; it must be recorded. The sisters ask for her visions to be told: “When
I had firmly fixed it in my heart that I would reveal them to no one, I was
seized by a very harsh torment in my heart in such a way that I thought
I was about to die. And so the sisters earnestly entreated and urged me to
reveal to them what I had seen.”62 They cannot be certain of her pain, but
Elisabeth is able to make it real for them by disclosing the divine visions.
When Elisabeth is whipped after speaking the Word of God, “which is

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sent to earth through [her] mouth, not so that it would be hidden,” she is
told that the Word must be shared so that it can “be made manifest for the
praise and glory of our Lord and for the salvation of His people.”63 Having
the responsibility to reveal the Word ultimately means that she has the
responsibility to make the Word and world real for others.
Because the experience of one’s pain cannot be fully comprehended by
another, the significance of language seems to become de-emphasized to
an extent. Intangible language thus reinforces the importance of the body
as expression and the significance of the interconnected spiritual world
and the physical body. Elisabeth predominantly uses generic language to
describe the attributes of pain, the essence of corporeal feeling: “Torment”
seizes her heart; she struggles “a long time in agony”; she feels “languish-
ing” throughout her body.64 If we look closely, though, her overgeneral-
ized portrayals of suffering are no less elaborate than those depictions from
Christ. When He implies that she should suffer because He has suffered,
all He says is, “Such things I have endured for you.”65 When she sees Him
in pain, she is able to detail His appearance—“His wounds were flow-
ing as if with fresh blood”—but in regards to the pain He is feeling, she
merely calls Him “pitiable,” and elsewhere she notices Him experiencing
“great distress,” just as she describes herself in distress.66 Cohen explains,
“Medieval sufferers and their caregivers were no less anxious than their
modern counterparts to establish a comprehensible connection between
individual sensation and the surrounding world,” leaving a more “norma-
tive model” of communication than a model that uses explicit details.67
Pain destroys language, in that the physical sensation of pain has no true
verbal signifier, but by using generic vocabulary, or a normative model of
communication, Elisabeth has the ability to make the pain universally com-
prehensible and lets the sufferer compare her physical pain to that of Christ
so that others may comprehend.
Through her own creative interpretation and narration of the visions,
Elisabeth essentially becomes a part of the divine message. Nearly all of her
ecstatic states are preceded by moments of suffering and, as Clark notes, to
an extent have biblical implications; however, at the same time, her visions
differ from common scriptural passages.68 Clark explains that biblical
passages surely known by Elisabeth “offered vivid symbols which Elisabeth
could then transform with her own visionary imagination into images
that have meaning for her,” but Clark continues by saying that Elisabeth’s
moments of ecstasy “appeared to free her from what we would call a
‘normal’ pattern of rational thought and allowed her to ‘see’ a reality that

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 jeffrey butcher 187

was itself influenced by her previous cognitive thought, such as meditation

on those biblical images that claimed her attention.”69 Elisabeth’s freedom
from the normative pattern reinforces her as an autonomous subject. If, as
Scarry says, “the scriptures can be understood as narratives about created
objects that enable the major created object, namely God, to describe the
interior structure of all making,”70 then by adapting scriptures to suit her
visions, Elisabeth becomes the one who describes the interior structure of
all making. Others’ perceptions of bodily and spiritual realities are created
by Elisabeth as others read and follow her visions and advice. The union
with Christ, as Ekbert states, allows her “to transcend her own mind and
see visions of the secrets of the Lord which were hidden from the eyes of
mortals.”71 If God is truly the projection of human properties, transcending
her own mind to obtain the secrets of the divine (re)connects Elisabeth with
her absolute essence.
Elisabeth also shows a simultaneous connection with humanity and
divinity as a result of her specific references to time, which figure into the
(re)making of the world. Specifics of time strengthen Elisabeth’s ethos.
Mitchell Merback urges us to understand the significance that time played
in public suffering and especially in regards to the actual Crucifixion.72 The
temporal aspect brings the divine into the human world, thus uniting divin-
ity and humanity. Elisabeth is extremely aware of time. When her voice
is stripped, she cannot talk until the “ninth hour.”73 She specifies exactly
how long her trances last, typically three or six hours— during the hours
of canonical prayer. Most importantly, she draws out the linear transition
from pain to relief—the moments of ecstasy, the time between languish
and refreshment. This becomes important when considering the recitation
of her visions. Coming out of pain and suffering, the time of complete
absoluteness, forces the person to rebuild the world when relief sets in. In
Elisabeth’s case, all of the pain endured gives her the opportunity to rebuild
the world through the Word, which actually becomes her own adaptation
of the Word.
Articulating her word publicly means the world is not necessarily
(re)made only for the suffering individual but, rather, also for those with
whom she shares a narrative account. Scarry is skeptical about “forcing
pain itself into avenues of objectification”;74 but familiarizing pain, revers-
ing the de-objectification process, is in essence (re-)creating the world.
Although pain itself cannot be signified except in abstract terms, Elisabeth
returns to a state of relief following her trances and is able to familiarize
the experience for others by making the external world out of what she

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 188 Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures

has seen in the divine world. When an account of pain is provided, we

see a sort of reverse estrangement take place; one must familiarize what is
unfamiliar, reversing the estrangement, or alienation, process.75 We can
understand this through Elisabeth’s confessions of pain that correspond
to the suffering Christ. The Passion is familiar, and, therefore, it acts as a
vehicle to explain Elisabeth’s own pain. Because imitating the suffering of
Christ was done for salvific purposes, mystics who shared in the suffering
of Christ served a salvific purpose as well. Elisabeth, by sharing the suffer-
ing of Christ, is offered the power to create the world: thus she assumes the
role of maker. Looking at Elisabeth as a creator means considering her to
have the properties of an autonomous individual—with essential traits that
make up her absolute essence.

conclusion: mystic self-representation

The absolute essence of Elisabeth reflects the fascination with the suffering
Christ during the medieval period. As a whole, it is true that the majority of
twelfth-century thinkers did not reflect on the suffering body as much as in
the following centuries.76 But because Elisabeth’s unique visions directly deal
with the suffering of Christ before the popularization of the suffering body,
we have another reason to give her more scholarly attention. Her visions
can help us trace the self-representation of the female mystic throughout
the medieval period. That self-representation and the emerging interest in
the Passion reflect a cultural fixation on the suffering body as a spectacle.
Ultimately, the mystical text encompasses the essence of the individual self,
and it may help us better understand the self-representation of the modern
individual as well. This sort of understanding can help us to retain the legiti-
macy of the autonomous pious human self. In the case of Elisabeth and
other religious ascetics, suffering with Christ proved to be a means to create
the autonomous human self without having to bring everything natural and
earthly into the equation. In actuality, by physically working on the body
for a spiritual cause, the ascetic shows herself to have physical and spiritual
qualities. Autonomy over the self, and thus the world, ostensibly represents
the absoluteness of the human self in both physical and spiritual essence.
Through studying the suffering body of medieval mystics and ascetics, spe-
cifically females because of their association with the carnal, we will start to
better understand this relationship. Elisabeth of Schönau’s personal narra-
tives are texts that represent the absolute essence of the self.

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 jeffrey butcher 189

notes

1. Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 67– 68.
2. The topics of mysticism and mystical union have occupied legions of theologians and
cannot be fully explored here. Rather than extensively delineating the theological history of
mysticism, which many of my secondary sources examine (specifically the works of Sarah
McNamer, Rachel Fulton, and Caroline Walker Bynum), I offer an argument on the theoretical
relationship between the mystic and matters of subjectivity.
3. I am specifically referring to the post-Enlightenment philosophies of Feuerbachian
materialism (a reaction against Hegelian idealism and a catalyst for Marxist materialism).
See Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 2nd ed., trans. George Eliot (London:
Routledge, 1996). I understand that the terms thing-in-itself and species-being are anachronistic,
but they are crucial to coining the term absolute essence.
4. Mystics such as Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Birgitta of Sweden receive
much more attention from scholars than Elisabeth.
5. I will refer to Elisabeth’s works in Elisabeth of Schönau: The Complete Works, trans. Anne
Clark (New York: Paulist Press, 2000). For an in-depth study of Elisabeth’s life and visions,
see Anne Clark, Elisabeth of Schönau: A Twelfth-Century Visionary (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1992); and Anne Clark, “Introduction,” in Elisabeth of Schönau, Complete
Works, 1–38. A biographical account may also be found in Joan M. Ferrante, To the Glory of
Her Sex: Women’s Roles in the Composition of Medieval Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1997), 139 –52. The biographical information in my article comes from these three
sources.
6. Clark, “Introduction,” 8.
7. Clark, Twelfth-Century Visionary, 82.
8. See ibid., especially the chapter “The Life of Elisabeth,” 11–27. Specific mention of her
reputation and popularity can be found at 24–27.
9. Barbara Newman, “Preface,” in Elisabeth of Schönau, Complete Works, xi.
10. Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1994), 134.
11. Visions of Jesus on the cross appear in Elisabeth of Schönau, Complete Works, 70 –71, 74,
Book I, Visions 42 – 43, 48. A vision of Christ following the Crucifixion occurs at 69, Book I,
Vision 4. Elisabeth refers to being read the Passion at 45– 46, Book I, Vision 3.
12. Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). Fulton notes that the “catalyst” of this emotional
change occurred when the expected apocalypse of 1033 did not happen.
13. McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion, 15. Also see her
chapter “Genealogy of a Genre” (59 – 87) for a fuller description of women’s turn to affective
compassion.
14. For an extensive explanation of the relationship between the female body and Christ, see
Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval
Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); and Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as
Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1982).
15. Elisabeth of Schönau, Complete Works, 123, Book III, Vision 4. Julian of Norwich too
envisions the suffering Christ in female form. See The Writings of Julian of Norwich: “A Vision
Showed to a Devout Woman” and “A Revelation of Love,” ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline
Jenkins (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006).
16. Laurie A. Finke, “Mystical Bodies and the Dialogics of Vision,” in Maps of Flesh and Light:
The Religious Experience of Medieval Women Mystics, ed. Ulrike Wiethaus (Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 1993), 28– 44, at 42. The reference to “excess” is a response to Michel Foucault’s
statement: “In the ‘excesses’ of torture, a whole economy of power is invested” (Discipline and
Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: Vintage, 1991], 35).
17. Elisabeth of Schönau, Complete Works, 257, “The Death of Elisabeth.” Ekbert’s description
appears in a letter written to his kinswomen (Guda, Hadewig, and Regelindis at Andernach),
but Ekbert refers to Elisabeth in the second person through most of the letter.
18. Ulrike Wiethaus, “In Search of Medieval Women’s Friendships: Hildegard of Bingen’s
Letters to Her Female Contemporaries,” in Wiethaus, Maps of Flesh and Light, 93–111, at 105.

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19. Elisabeth of Schönau, Complete Works, 44, Book I, Vision 1. See Clark, “Introduction,” 3,
for more on Elisabeth and her refusal of treatment.
20. Elisabeth of Schönau, Complete Works, 90 –92, Book I, Visions 76 –77.
21. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1985), 7, 22.
22. Elisabeth of Schönau, Complete Works, 43, 57, Book I, Visions 1, 21.
23. Ibid., 57, 49, Book I, Visions 21, 8.
24. Ibid., 55, Book I, Vision 20.
25. Ibid., 42, Book I, Vision 1.
26. Visions that mention Satan mostly occur among Elisabeth’s earlier visions, when her
doubts are at their greatest. These can be seen in ibid., 42, 45– 46, 50, 90, Book I, Visions 1,
3, 12, 76.
27. Esther Cohen, The Modulated Scream: Pain in Late Medieval Culture (Chicago: University
of Chicago, 2010), 5.
28. See the chapter “Policing Truth,” in Gilmore, Autobiographics, 106 –30.
29. Wiethaus, “In Search of Medieval Women’s Friendships,” 105.
30. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1982), 127.
31. Elisabeth of Schönau, Complete Works, 79, Book I, Vision 56.
32. Ibid., 101, Book II, Vision 7.
33. Robert Mills, Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure, and Punishment in Medieval Culture
(London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 20.
34. Clark, Twelfth-Century Visionary, 103.
35. Elisabeth of Schönau, Complete Works, 65, Book I, Vision 35.
36. Scarry, Body in Pain, 46 – 47. This is because when being tortured, specifically in the
course of war, the victim who blurts out information as a result of being tortured feels alienated
from the self because he does not have control of his voice, feels self-betrayal for giving up
secretive content, and feels hatred because of giving up information.
37. Elisabeth of Schönau, Complete Works, 93, Book I, Vision 78.
38. Ibid., 69 –70, Book I, Vision 41.
39. Ibid., 72, Book I, Vision 46.
40. Ellen Ross, “‘She Wept and Cried Right Loud for Sorrow and for Pain’: Suffering, the
Spiritual Journey, and Women’s Experience in Late Medieval Mysticism,” in Wiethaus, Maps
of Flesh and Light, 45–59, at 47.
41. Elisabeth of Schönau, Complete Works, 71, Book I, Vision 42.
42. Ibid., 72 –73, Book I, Vision 46.
43. Ibid., 69, Book I, Vision 41.
44. Ibid., 94, Book I, Vision 78. Interestingly enough, in Holy Feast and Holy Fast Bynum
explains that some biographers suppose that by the sixteenth-century holy women do not
sweat (211).
45. Elisabeth of Schönau, Complete Works, 70, Book I, Vision 42.
46. Ibid., 94, Book I, Vision 78.
47. Ellen M. Ross, The Grief of God: Images of the Suffering Jesus in Late Medieval England
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 19.
48. Elisabeth of Schönau, Complete Works, 73, Book I, Vision 47.
49. Ibid., 87, Book I, Vision 70. The conversation with Christ comes from the scriptures Jer
1:6, Ex 4:10, and Lk 10:16.
50. Elisabeth of Schönau, Complete Works, 59, Book I, Vision 24.
51. Ibid., 86, Book I, Vision 69.
52. Ibid., 93–94, Book I, Vision 78. While I take this passage from Book I, it also occurs in
Book III in a letter addressed to Hildegard of Bingen (138, Vision 19).
53. Ibid., 39, “The Preface of Abbot Ekbert to the Visions.”
54. Ibid., 41, Book I, Vision 1.
55. Gilmore, Autobiographics, 134.
56. For a strictly medievalist take on the inexpressibility of pain, see Esther Cohen’s chapter
“The Vocabulary and Typology of Pain,” in Modulated Scream, 147– 63.
57. Elisabeth of Schönau, Complete Works, 74, Book I, Vision 48.
58. Ibid., 44, Book I, Vision 1.
59. Scarry, Body in Pain, 34.
60. Ibid., 162.

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 jeffrey butcher 191

61. Gilmore, Autobiographics, 6.

62. Elisabeth of Schönau, Complete Works, 56 –57, Book I, Vision 21.
63. Ibid., 93–94, Book I, Vision 78.
64. Ibid., 43, 63, 69, Book I, Visions 1, 31, 41. See Scarry, Body in Pain, 1–23, for further
discussion of medical vocabulary regarding to the intensity and felt attributes of pain.
65. Elisabeth of Schönau, Complete Works, 70, Book I, Vision 41.
66. Ibid., 69, 72, Book I, Visions 41, 46.
67. Cohen, Modulated Scream, 113–14. Cohen comments on modern pain discourse in which
the goal of the sufferer is to explain his pain in a comprehensible fashion: “body language,
spoken language, sounds, or any other means of communication that might be interpreted as
pain by whoever is nearby” (113).
68. Clark delineates the connections between Elisabeth’s visions and biblical visions
(Twelfth-Century Visionary, 75); in her translation of Elisabeth’s Complete Works, Clark marks
scriptural passages appropriated and adapted by Elisabeth.
69. Clark, Twelfth-Century Visionary, 76.
70. Scarry, Body in Pain, 181.
71. Elisabeth of Schönau, Complete Works, 41, Book I, Vision 1.
72. Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of
Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
73. Elisabeth of Schönau, Complete Works, 94, Book I, Vision 78.
74. Scarry, Body in Pain, 6.
75. Reverse estrangement is a term I borrow from the Russian formalist movement, specifically
the works of Viktor Shklovsky. In Viktor Shklovsky, The Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher
(Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), Shklovsky explains the method of estrangement,
making the familiar unfamiliar, in prose. Although I am not referring to fiction, reverse
estrangement serves the purpose of re-creating referential content while also opposing the
alienation of the self reborn through language.
76. Cohen, Modulated Scream, 200. Cohen does, however, recognize the eleventh and twelfth
centuries as the beginning of the popularized Passion of Christ.

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