Theological Breadth, Interconnection, Tradition, and Gender: Hildegard, Hadewijch, and Julian Today

As women theologians, especially, have made dear, we and our world are complex. We need theology which relates that complexity coherently to God. In that regard there is something to be learned from medieval theological reflections, which are often much more comprehensive than we may imagine or than our modern specialists may suggest. Heirs to a classical educational syllabus, writers in the Middle Ages instinctively interconnected, and enriched their Godward thinking with their understanding of language, symbolism, society, the physical world, philosophy, ethics, personal being, aesthetics, and more. This is especially true of the three women discussed in the article, all of whom, judged by these criteria, wrote more effectively than even Anselm or Aquinas. Here, then, we have resources and encouragement for a more engaged, more immediate, and more widely "in touch" shared response to God in Christ in the power of the Spirit.

"I have a very simple faith. Why do theologians have to make things so complicated?" Perhaps we sympathize. Yet life is not simple, our world is not simple, and even the simplest of us is veiy complex. And the God some of us hope to get to know better holds together, and even in some way correlates, all this complexity. The best theological reflection we can each manage individually and engage in together must surely encompass and interlink as much as possible of that complexity.

Women theologians seem more likely to include in their work a greater breadth of interconnected fields of concern, and more disciplined attention to them, than the majority of their male colleagues. That is, admittedly, a subjective conviction, but it is based on reading and on seminars chosen by topic, not by author. In fact, overtly feminist writers do very often explicitly claim just such a breadth of interest, though they leave any comparison with male colleagues implicit.1

There is no attempt here to "essentialize" women theologians on the basis either of subjective conclusion or of overt intention, although it would seem understandable that women should be likely to find more that is questionable and so, more questions worth addressing. My concern in what follows is with breadth and interconnectedness in theological method and concern. First, I mean to argue that a breadth of theological concern is classical, or, one might say, historically foundational, for Christian reflection and believing. secondly, and at greater length, I wish to show that once we have access to comparable theological reflection from women and men, in the medieval period in the Christian West, it does seem to have been possible for the women to recover something of that early breadth, in ways that many men and women today may find illuminating and formative. Modern Christian theological reflection continues to engage with its past as indispensable resource. I urge that in our current reflections we pay more grateful attention to early, medieval, and contemporary achievements of breadth and interconnectedness; and, to that end, that in church and academy we also pay more expectant attention to this aspect of the work of women colleagues doing theology today in a wide range of contexts.

It is clear to all commentators that the articulate Christian leaders who in the first four centuries settled our canon of writings and shaped our ways of appropriating them, and who gave us our creedal formularies, had all received what we still call a "classical education," the trivium and quadrivium that together encompassed, at least in principle, all accepted ways to attain and share knowledge of all there was to be known.2 What seems less readily acknowledged is the extent to which that breadth was deployed pervasively in the theological reflections of those whose writings have come down to us. Surveys pick out contentious conclusions on divine unity and Trinity and Incarnation and other topoi, abstracted from the original warp and weft, as though the latter were mere packaging. Taking the examples of Athanasius and Gregory of Nyssa among the Greeks, and of Augustine and Hilary among the Latins, I tiy elsewhere to show just how much richer their reflections are than the surveys suggest.3 all their "doctrines" are in practice integrally bound up with their implicit and explicit understanding of language, symbolism, the wider human and the other-than-human world, of the past and its records, of physical processes, of philosophical schools and their metaphysics, of ethics and aesthetics, and of persons and relationships. Yet a modernist theory of language has encouraged more recent theologians to suppose that a few key words can "contain" all that matters of what these early authors "tried to say," a theory that matches neither the theory nor the practice of the ancient Mediterranean world.4 The result is rather less helpful than treating a printout of my DNA sequence as me.

The articulate theologians of the high Middle Ages themselves received a version of the same education; and at least by the twelfth centuiy in the West, this again included the works of classical pagan authors.5 We might then expect much the same classical breadth and interconnectedness in such as Anselm, Bernard, or Thomas. In the event, at least on my reading, and under most headings, while there are important vestiges of the breadth and the interconnections made in the early centuries, they are, in these male writers, disappointingly meager, and fewer. Anselm deliberately seeks an abstract logic that will support what he sees as agreed conclusions, Peter Lombard assembles "sentences," loci, and Aquinas works on that basis. Yet, somehow, such women theologians as Hildegard of Hingen, Hadewijch of Anvers, and julian of Norwich achieve a breadth of concern and interlinkage that comes near to matching that of such as Gregory or Augustine.6 It may be that the popular preaching they heard was much richer than the more "academic" writings that have reached us (and in some cases, seem to have reached the women). If that could be shown, it would also be of interest. But the fact remains that neither the "affective" spiritual preaching of a Bernard, nor the "intellectual" spiritual addresses of Eckhart, nor the academic reasoning of such as Anselm or Aquinas display anything equaling the richness of Hildegard or of Hadewijch (dependent though Eckhart is on the latter), or of julian.7 It is, then, puzzling that only julian from among the three women seems to be much used as a wider theological resource today, while the former two seem to be read for their individual mystical experience or for "green" issues (Hildegard), or are categorized under philosophy.8 all these interests are warranted, but not so as to be pursued to the exclusion of the wider and creative theological reflections all three afford us.