Assessment
The Sister Catherine Treatise is often cited, along with Marguerite Porete's The Mirror of Simple Souls, as one of the representative literary expressions of the Heresy of the Free Spirit, which held that a divine union with God was possible to people in this life and, more controversially, independently of the ministrations of the Church. Initially attributed to Meister Eckhart in Franz Pfeiffer's ground-breaking edition of the Christian mystic's works in 1857 it is now regarded as not being by him but showing evidence of his thinking, or at least evidence of the Free Spirit movement which Eckhart was accused of adhering to.
Written in a heightened emotional prose which gives the Treatise a slightly hysterical, hallucinatory quality the work espouses a highly feminine approach to the Christian Mystery, with lengthy discussions of the significance of Mary Magdalene as the true lover of Christ (an element which links it to Porete, some of the alleged beliefs of the Cathars and the speculations of Dan Brown) and the figure of Sister Catherine herself emerging as more initiated into the inner spirituality of Christianity than her male counterpart. In it many of the articles of faith of the Free Spirit movement are expressed - a neo-Platonic/panentheistic belief in God's immanence in Creation, the possibility of salvation and the Unio Mystica in this life, the limitations of Church teaching in terms of real mystical insight - and as such it is a valuable document for those in search of understanding the more radical approach to interpreting the Gospels of the Medieval period known as the Heresy of the Free Spirit.
The treatise is the only currently known medieval work which mentions the well-known question of how many angels can stand, or perhaps perch (siczen), on the point of a needle: "doctors declare that in heaven a thousand angels can stand on the point of a needle (tusent selen siczen in dem himelrich uff einer nadel spicz)." Dancing on the point of a needle appears to be a later concept.
Read more about this topic: Sister Catherine Treatise
Famous quotes containing the word assessment:
“The first year was critical to my assessment of myself as a person. It forced me to realize that, like being married, having children is not an end in itself. You don’t at last arrive at being a parent and suddenly feel satisfied and joyful. It is a constantly reopening adventure.”
—Anonymous Mother. From the Boston Women’s Health Book Collection. Quoted in The Joys of Having a Child, by Bill and Gloria Adler (1993)