Prominent 20th-century liturgical historians have tended to treat the Medieval period as one of liturgical deformation and dissolution, where the once vibrant liturgy of the Patristic era became obscured by an increasingly individualistic and subjective piety. In this narrative, the veil of Latin rendered non-clerical participants as marginalized spectators who were often more preoccupied with the inner life and visions at the expense of communal liturgical practices. Theodor Klauser, for example, argued that the liturgy degenerated from the common act of priest and people to “now exclusively a priestly duty;” the “people were still present, but they devoted themselves during the sacred action to non-liturgical, subjective, pious exercises.”¹ While there is a kernel of truth in these claims, such sweeping generalizations do not fully account for the diverse and complex reality of medieval worship. A growing body of scholarly research has challenged these caricatures by highlighting that medieval men and women, both religious and lay, creatively and actively engaged with the liturgical action and were concerned with communal practices beyond the confines of subjective piety.²

Perhaps the most prominent among these examples of the medieval integration of private devotion and a liturgical spirituality come from the Benedictine monastic community at Helfta, Germany, home to a flowering of 13th-century mysticism associated primarily with the names of Gertrude the Great of Helfta (1256–1302) and Mechtilde of Hackeborn (1240/1241–1298). While one would naturally expect the work of medieval monastics to reflect the daily round of lectio divina, Mass, and the Divine Office, the visions, ecstasies, and spiritual teachings of the Helfta nuns have consistently been called more “overtly liturgical,”³ even leading some scholars to label them as “liturgical mystics.”⁴ The Helfta literature overflows with accounts of visions occurring during Mass and the Office, visions which are themselves profoundly saturated with the language of the liturgy. Cyprian Vagaggini notes that the very first thing which strikes even a superficial reader of Gertrude’s writings is that “the liturgical vision of the world really constitutes in her the primary and unifying form of her way of living in depth the life of the spirit.”⁵ The liturgical actions of “Mass and Communion, of the canonical hours, of the feasts, of the liturgical times, constitutes the psychological frame, not only external but internal as well, of attention, of desire, of love, in the coordination of which her life unfolds as a search for God, as fruitful union with Him, and as a return to men in order to lead them to God.”⁶

Piety in Practice

While the nuns of Helfta are typically associated with accounts of mystical ecstasies, it is worth remembering that not all the Helfta literature focuses exclusively on visions. Gertrude’s Spiritual Exercises present a series of private prayers, devotions, and litanies that are not substitutes for liturgical participation, but forms of piety inspired by and infused with scripture and the liturgy. Not only does the text frequently cite collects, antiphons, responsories, prefaces, etc. from the Mass and Office, but the reader is struck by the very “liturgical” structuring of the text: the first exercise is freely based on the liturgical rites of initiation comprising Baptism, Confirmation, and Communion; the second, third, and fourth exercises highlight the milestones in a woman monastic’s life through a renewal of the rituals of clothing, consecration, and profession; and exercises five through seven have the Divine Office as their liturgical background, containing meditations for preparing for death and increasing devotion to divine love and thanksgiving to God, all structured around the seven canonical hours.⁷

Perhaps the most theologically profound is the first exercise centered on the rites of initiation which focuses on the theme of rebirth and ties into the liturgical year: “To be in the condition, at the end of your life, of presenting to the Lord the spotless garment of your baptismal innocence and the whole and undefiled seal of your Christian faith, be zealous at certain times, especially at Pasch and at Pentecost, in celebrating the memory of your baptism. Accordingly, desire to be reborn in God through the holiness of new life and to be restored to a new infancy….”⁸

To do this, Gertrude invites her readers to envisage an actual baptismal ceremony, leading them with meditations through the ritual words and actions of different stages of the liturgy. These include devotions and litanies after reading the Creed, saying the formula of the exorcism, signing oneself with the sign of the cross, tasting the salt of wisdom, laying on of hands (by Jesus instead of the priest), receiving Mary as godmother, being immersed in the baptismal fountain, etc. The meditations end with beautiful prayers for Communion that highlight the life-giving power of the sacrament, showing that the Eucharist too is a sacrament of re-birth.⁹

Visionary Commentaries

While we may tend to oppose objective liturgical piety to subjective mystical experience, the liturgical language and content of the Helfta visions reveal this as a false dichotomy. Medieval historian Jean Leclerq notes that since the “revelations” always occur at liturgical places, times, and contexts, the nuns use the words of the liturgy “naturally, normally, easily, spontaneously,” drawing on the “very expressions of the liturgy” to express their “own personal prayer in the language of the official, public prayer;” hence their inner piety “vivifies” their liturgical office just as their liturgical life “nourishes” their personal piety.¹⁰ At the center of Gertrude’s Herald of Divine Love and Mechtilde’s Book of Special Grace are lengthy narratives explicitly and systematically structured according to the course of the liturgical year, such that they can even be considered “visionary commentaries on the mystical significance of the annual liturgical cycle.”¹¹

For instance, Gertrude’s visions during the Christmas and Candlemas liturgies emphasize the spiritual meaning of the season as the birth of Christ in the soul by means of a progressive divinization and transformation in Christ.¹² In a vision on Christmas, Gertrude meditates on this truth as she is changed into the same color as the divine child: “And while I held him within my soul, suddenly I saw myself entirely transformed into the color of the heavenly babe…. I rejoiced that I was not denied the welcome presence and delightful caresses of my Spouse…. I drank in, like deep draughts from a cup of nectar, divinely inspired words such as these: ‘As I am the figure of the substance of the Father (Heb. 1:3) through my divine nature, in the same way, you shall be the figure of my substance through my human nature, receiving in your deified soul the brightness of my divinity, as the air receives the sun’s rays and, penetrated to the very marrow by this unifying light, you will become capable of an ever closer union with me.’”¹³

Mechtilde offers a beautiful pre-Lenten meditation on the spiritual journey of the soul which the Christian will undertake in the coming Lenten season, in response to Christ’s invitation on Quinquagesima to dwell on a mountain with him for 40 days and nights. Mechtilde travels through different plateaus of the mountain, describing the heavenly gathering as she ascends toward the summit: “all the angels and saints surrounded the mountain, chanting in unison with God the sweet healing prayer of love. The chant was so sweet, the modulation so gentle, that no human tongue would be able to repeat it.”¹⁴ At the top of the mountain, images of a royal feast and celestial banquet occur as “The Son of the Virgin came [himself] to offer for them a delicious food, that is to say, his adorable body, bread of life and of salvation…. He also offers the chalice filled with pure wine, that is to say, the blood of the immaculate lamb, who purifies the heart from all defilement. The Lord said: ‘Now I have given to your soul with all its goodness, what I am…you in me and I in you; you will never be separated from me.’”¹⁵ Mechtilde’s reception of the Eucharist, the very “summit” of our faith, at the mountain’s summit in the midst of the throne of the Holy Trinity and heavenly hosts and choirs of angels, highlights the interwoven present, eschatological, and cosmic dimensions of the Eucharistic mystery.¹⁶ By highlighting the Eucharistic and eschatological culmination of the spiritual journey, Mechtilde reveals the mystical meaning of the Lenten season not just as preparation for Easter but as the gradual unfolding of the mystery of redemption in the soul.

Immersed in the Liturgy

Uwe Michael Lang has recently drawn attention to the fact that “active” participation in the medieval liturgy was not predominantly textual, but a “synesthetic experience” facilitated through immersion in the sensory dimensions of the liturgy (seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting).¹⁷ Medieval scholar Anna Harrison finds this exemplified in the visions of Gertrude and Mechtilde, who emerge as “lively and engaged participants in the liturgy, sensitive to the intricacy of the individual components that comprised each [liturgical] observance: The physical objects Mechtild and Gertrude saw and touched, the words they chanted and to which they listened, seeped into their imagination, giving rise to and becoming the stuff of visions, suffusing communal song, reception, or a gospel reading with tangled layers of meaning, charging everyday routine with sometimes exalted, sometimes elaborate, and often weighty intellectual meaning, as well as deeply personal significance.”¹⁸

For instance, Gertrude enlisted the help of a fellow nun to pray a certain prayer before a crucifix that she might be pierced with the arrow of love from Christ’s wounded heart, and her petition only becomes activated in a vision during Mass: “Certain signs…now appeared on the picture of your crucifixion. After I had received the life-giving Sacrament, on returning to my place, it seemed to me as if, on the right side of the Crucified painted in the book, that is to say, on the wound in the side, a ray of sunlight with a sharp point like an arrow came forth, and spread itself out for a moment and then drew back. It continued like this for a while and affected me gently but deeply.”¹⁹

In addition to devotional objects in a liturgical context inducing visions, many commentators have drawn attention to the indispensable role of the musical context and imagery underlying the Helfta visions. After all, many of their visions take place during chants (antiphons, sequences, Glorias, Alleluias) or even during the individual words or syllables within single chants, and tend to follow the same standard formula: “During (matins/mass/vespers) one day in (week/feast) x, when (responsory/antiphon/sequence) y was being sung….” The texts then relate what Mechtilde or Gertrude saw, heard, tasted, or felt during the liturgical chant or hour.²⁰ During the singing of an antiphon commemorating the death of a former Abbess, Mechtilde envisions a choir of souls encircling Christ and singing a hymn to the Virgin, as a “great trumpet” (tuba magna) emerges from Christ’s heart and harmoniously blends all of their voices together into a beautiful melody.²¹ In one case, Gertrude visualizes God the Father as a musician playing on the instrument of his Son for her sake, and in another, she sees Christ as a harpist within her who reveals a musical pipe, a fistula, coming out of the wound in his side to beckon her to union: “During the infinitely sweet delight which this caused her, she felt herself to be drawn in an indescribable way, through the pipe we have mentioned, into the heart of the Lord, and she had the happiness of finding herself within the very being of her spouse and lord. What she felt, saw, heard, tasted, touched, is known to her alone, and to him who deigned to admit her to such a union.”²²

Visions of Community

Far from being privatized, individualistic experiences, the Helfta visionaries allowed the spirituality of corporate liturgical worship to permeate into the collaborative composition of their works, as many nuns in the community cooperated in redacting the visions in The Herald of Divine Love and The Book of Divine Grace.²³ Ultimately, the visions were not ends in themselves or the result of a reflexive self-preoccupation with psychological states, but served for the edification of the monastic community and the spiritual experiences of others. On one occasion the Lord left Gertrude the choice of being illuminated in a superior and profound way, beyond discursive concepts and images but incommunicable to others, or in a lesser but communicable way; she preferred the latter because it would be more spiritually enriching to others: “…so that those who will read them may take delight in the sweetness of Your mercy and thus attracted, they may have greater experiences of Your intimacy. Students learn the alphabet first, but finally arrive even at the study of logic; and in this same way, may they through the portrayal of these images, be led to taste in themselves that hidden manna which cannot be accurately described through any combination of corporeal images and which becomes the sole desire of him who has once tasted of it.”²⁴

The study of liturgy is not only a matter of texts and the contexts that shape them. It is also the actualization of tradition in the here and now, as sources are received and appropriated to respond to the needs of each new Christian era. Many of the pioneers of the 19th- and 20th-century Liturgical Movement and monastic renewal were keenly interested in a retrieval of the liturgical piety of the Helfta nuns. The Liturgical Movement sought to restore the liturgy to its rightful place as the indispensable heart of Christian spirituality, and reformers grappled with ways to reconcile the spread of popular extra-liturgical devotions with a renewed emphasis on the communal, objective prayer of the liturgy. These theologians and reformers, in their retrieval of sources of the medieval period, found in the school of Helfta an example of how a life of mystical contemplation and devotional practices could be harmonized with a life structured by the liturgy, and anchored in its firm dogmatic foundations.

As we have seen throughout our brief survey of Helfta piety, even the most personal, subjective, and interior forms of devotion were always oriented towards the spiritual growth of others and their personal interiorization of the mystical meaning of liturgical time, feast, and season. Prosper Guéranger, often referred to as the very “father” of the Liturgical Movement, translated Gertrude’s Spiritual Exercises in order to open up their riches and allow their focus on the essential foundations of scripture, the Divine Office, and lectio divina to guide the rejuvenation of Benedictine life at Solesmes.²⁵ Other classical works of the Liturgical Movement, such as Louis Bouyer’s Liturgical Piety and Cyprian Vagaggini’s Theological Dimensions of the Liturgy describe how Gertrude and Mechtilde were originators of many later devotions, such as devotion to the Sacred Heart, but find their formulation of the devotion structured by and in tune with the liturgical mystery. Indeed, it was spoken of Gertrude by her confidantes that she always sought that her “devotion might be in harmony with the liturgy.”²⁶ For example, instead of emotional, sentimental understandings which later attach themselves to the Sacred Heart devotion, Bouyer sees the Helfta visions as “motivated by an authentic sense of that deep unity of all Christianity in the unity of the Mystery itself as being, finally, the revelation of divine love,” and therefore an example of how modern devotions could be rethought “along the lines of the liturgy.”²⁷

Spirituality of the Liturgy

Both Vagaggini and Benedictine monk Anselm Stolz find in the nuns of Helfta an articulation of the universal call to the mystical life as the unfolding of baptismal grace, a life which is “entirely at ease in being born, in developing, and in maturing within the framework of a liturgical spirituality.”²⁸ This quality pushed back against some concerns in the school of Carmelite spirituality that a spirituality based on the liturgical action is too distracting or even counterproductive to the preparation and development of the mystical life; but, instead of being a “second rank” spirituality good for only novices, Gertrude shows that a spirituality based on the liturgy “furnishes the Christian life with a complete framework which assimilates to itself and orders within itself all the elements needed to lead one who follows it to the highest perfection.”²⁹ A number of articles in Orate Fratres, the flagship journal of the American Liturgical Movement, also emphasize the mutually enriching relationship between personal meditation and liturgical celebration visible in the writings of Helfta. Hilda Graef concludes that, “our age likes to specialize and separate things, and even the spiritual life has not escaped this tendency. There are those who, enamored of a one-sided interpretation of John of the Cross, cry ‘nada, nada, nada’—nothing, neither religious art nor music, complete detachment from all sensible beauty and the nakedness of the spirit alone…. And there are others, who would deprecate all solitary mental prayer and restrict salvation to corporate worship…. There are few examples of a more happy marriage of an intense devotion to the liturgy and a mystic life of the highest order than the spirituality of St. Gertrude.”³⁰ While those involved with the Liturgical Movement and 20th century ressourcement are sometimes criticized for an exclusive focus on the normativity of the liturgical sources of the Patristic era, attention to the medieval piety of Helfta stands out as a notable exception.

Vital Testament

Although 20th-century liturgical scholars often portrayed the Middle Ages as a liturgical autumn, Uwe Michael Lang reminds us that “elements of decline and vitality existed side by side.”³¹ The liturgical mysticism of the nuns of Helfta is surely a prominent testament to such vitality. The sacramental quality of their visions makes use of the full range of the human imagination, engaging with sensory language, ritual actions, scriptural imagery and tropes, liturgical texts, and the arts. They remain a model of how the public, universal liturgy can become assimilated in the spiritual lives of believers and truly made their own. David Fagerberg has argued that the heart of true liturgical mysticism lies not in extraordinary psychological phenomena but the realization in experience of the mystery of Christ becoming our mystery through the liturgy.³² It is this experience of the liturgy as ultimately the mystery of “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27) that Bouyer believes Gertrude “will enable us to make our own through what the Second Vatican Council described as ‘an actual and personal participation’ in the prayer, the ‘service,’ of the whole church.”³³

Pope Benedict XVI, who devoted two Wednesday General Audiences in 2010 to Gertrude and Mechtilde, finds in the lives of these saints “a strong invitation to us to intensify our friendship with the Lord, especially through daily prayer and attentive, faithful and active participation in Holy Mass,” and a reminder that “the Liturgy is a great school of spirituality.”³⁴ These are words of encouragement to those today who seek the revitalization of a sacramental imagination, convinced like Gertrude and Mechtilde that we participate in the unseen and spiritual through liturgical sign and symbol because “in the earthly liturgy we take part in a foretaste of that heavenly liturgy which is celebrated in the holy city of Jerusalem toward which we journey as pilgrims” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 8).

1. Theodor Klauser, A Short History of the Western Liturgy (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 97. Joseph Jungmann, the preeminent 20th-century historian of the Roman Rite, viewed this shift towards the subjective piety of the devotio moderna as part of a “corruption theory” of liturgical development where “the priest alone is active. The faithful, viewing what he is performing, are like spectators looking on at a mystery-filled drama of our Lord’s Way of the Cross” [Joseph Jungmann, SJ, The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origin and Development (Missarum Sollemnia), trans. Francis A. Brunner (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1988), vol. I, 117].
2. Some prominent examples of this stream of scholarly thought include Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); John Bossy, “The Mass as a Social Institution, 1200–1700,” Past and Present 100 (1983); Charles Caspers, “Augenkommunion or Popular Mysticism,” in Bread of Heaven: Customs and Practices Surrounding Holy Communion, eds. Charles Caspers, Gerard Lukken, and Gerard Rouwhorst (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1995). See also the recent treatment in Adoremus Bulletin by Timothy O’Malley, “Medieval Assent: Communion of Body and Soul as an Ascending Model for Liturgy,” available online at https://adoremus.org/2021/01/medieval-assent-communion-of-body-and-soul-as-an-ascending-model-for-liturgy/
3. Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism (1200–1350), vol. III of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1998), 270.
4. Sabine B. Spitzlei, Erfahrungsraum Herz: Zur Mystik des Zisterzienserinnenklosters Helfta im 13 Jahrhundert (Stuttgart–Bad: Cannstatt, 1991), 77.
5. Cyprian Vagaggini, O.S.B., Theological Dimensions of the Liturgy: A General Treatise on the Theology of the Liturgy, trans. Leonard Doyle and W.A. Jurgens (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1976), 741.
6. Vagaggini, Theological Dimensions of the Liturgy, 741–742.
7. See Jack Lewis, “Introduction,” in Gertrud the Great of Helfta: The Spiritual Exercises, trans. Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1989), 11–12.
8. Lewis, “Introduction,” 21.
9. Lewis, “Introduction,” 12. Contrary to certain caricatures of medieval liturgy, the Helfta nuns emphasize the importance of reception of communion, and Gertrude encourages her readers when they receive “of the life-giving body and the blood of the spotless lamb, Jesus Christ, [to say]:…O most dulcet guest of my soul, my Jesus very close to my heart, let your pleasant embodiment be for me today the remission of all my sins, and amends for all my thoughtlessness, and also the recovery of all my wasted life. Let it be for me eternal salvation, the healing of soul and body, the inflaming of love, the replenishing of virtue, and the enclosing of my life sempiternally in you…” (28–29).
10. Jean Leclerq, “Liturgy and Mental Prayer in the Life of St. Gertrude,” Sponsa Regis 31 (1960): 3. Gertrude’s skilled capacity to even interweave multiple liturgical texts is visible in her description of a vision of Mary: “May this blessed Virgin, rose without a thorn, immaculate white lily, in whom there flourishes an abundance of every virtue, enrich our poverty; may she be for us, we pray, a perpetual intercessor.” In her translation, Margaret Winkworth points out that the “rose without a thorn” most likely alludes to the sequence Ave Maria known from manuscripts of the 11th and 12th centuries in South Germany, while the “perpetual intercessor” stems from the Marian antiphon Gaude Dei Genetrix [Gertrude of Helfta: The Herald of Divine Love, trans. Margaret Winkworth (New York: Paulist, 1993), 150, n. 86 and 87].
11. Bernard McGinn, Flowering of Mysticism, 270.
12. See Lillian Thomas Shank, “The Christmas Mystery in Gertrude of Helfta,” Cistercian Studies 24, no. 4 (1989): 330–331.
13. The Herald of Divine Love, 104.
14. The Book of Special Grace, 1.13; cited in Ann Marie Caron, R.S.M.,“Taste and See the Goodness of the Lord: Mechtild of Hackeborn,” in Hidden Springs Cistercian Monastic Women, vol. 3, bk. 2 of Medieval Religious Women, ed. John A. Nichols and Lillian Thomas Shank (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1995), 516.
15. The Book of Special Grace, 1.13; cited in Caron, “Taste and See the Goodness of the Lord: Mechtild of Hackeborn,” 517.
16. The Book of Special Grace, 1.13; cited in Caron,“Taste and See the Goodness of the Lord: Mechtild of Hackeborn,” 517–518.
17. Uwe Michael Lang, “The Later Middle Ages: All Decay and Decline? – A Short History of the Roman Rite of Mass: Part XIV, AB Insight 30 March 2022 (https://adoremus.org/2022/03/the-later-middle-ages-all-decay-and-decline-a-short-history-of-the-roman-rite-of-mass-part-xiv/).
18. Anna Harrison, “‘I am Wholly Your Own’: Liturgical Piety and Community among the Nuns of Helfta,” Church History 78, no. 3 (2009): 562.
19. The Herald of Divine Love, 102.
20. See Bruce Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 242–243.
21. The Book of Special Grace 6.9; cited in Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture, 247.
22. See Spiritual Exercises 6, 204, and The Herald of Divine Love, 3.26; cited in Holsinger, Music, Body and Desire in Medieval Culture, 247.
23. See Anna Harrison, Thousands and Thousands of Lovers: Sense of Community among the Nuns of Helfta (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2022).
24. The Herald of Divine Love, 2.24; cited in Vagaggini, Theological Dimensions of the Liturgy, 776–777.
25. English translation of Gueranger’s edition is The Exercises of Saint Gertrude, Virgin and Abbess, of the Order of St. Benedict, trans. Thomas Alder Pope (London: Burns, Oates, and Washbourne, 1921). In contrast to what he views as the aridity of some works of modern spirituality, Guéranger claims that in Gertrude we breathe in a different atmosphere: “The source of the special blessing attached to St. Gertrude is because it is impregnated with the divine Word, with liturgy and the sacred scriptures. This holy daughter of the cloister drank in light and life day by day from the sources of all true contemplation, from the very fountain of living waters which gushes forth from the psalms and inspired words of the divine office. Her every sentence shows how exclusively her soul was nourished with this heavenly food. She so lived into the liturgy of the Church that we continually find in her revelations that the Savior discloses to her the mysteries of heaven and the mother of God and the saints hold converse with her on some antiphon, or response, or introit…of which she is striving to feel all the force and the sweetness” (xviii–xix).
26. The Herald of Divine Love, 4.20; cited in Vagaggini, Theological Dimensions of the Liturgy, 792.
27. Louis Bouyer, Liturgical Piety (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1955), 251.
28. Vagaggini, Theological Dimensions of the Liturgy, 791. See also Anselm Stolz, “Mysticism as the Normal Flowering of the Sacramental Life,” Orate Fratres 17, no. 9 (1943): 396.
29. Vagaggini, Theological Dimensions of the Liturgy, 791–792.
30. Hilda Graef, “St. Gertrude: The Mystical Flowering of the Liturgy,” Orate Fratres 20, no. 4 (1946): 171. See also Pierre Doyere, “St. Gertrude, Mystic and Nun,” Worship 34, no. 9 (1960): 536–543.
31. Lang, “The Later Middle Ages: All Decay and Decline?”
32. David Fagerberg, On Liturgical Mysticism (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2019).
33. Louis Bouyer, “Preface,” in The Herald of Divine Love, 2.
34. Pope Benedict XVI, General Audience on Saint Matilda of Hackeborn (29 September 2010), at The Holy See, https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/audiences/2010/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20100929.html; General Audience on Saint Gertrude the Great (6 October 2010), at The Holy See, https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/audiences/2010/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20101006.html.