No Justice, No Peace: Mechthild of Magdeburg and The Long Lineage of Protest Poetry

Poets say the strangest things. I first learned this when I became absolutely preoccupied by Emily Dickinson in the fourth grade. In that reading, I learned that poets are tuned to language beyond its common use. 

I am taken back to those early readings of Dickinson when I think about the pantheon of Christian mystics, figures like Hildegard von Bingen and Julian of Norwich. These women have a reputation for being mysterious or inscrutable, but they’re really not so different from other poets. They use their ears and words differently from most people. There’s more music present, but also more daring.

The Work of a Poet

Though perhaps less well known than Hildegard or Julian, Mechthild of Magdeburg (c. 1207 – c. 1282/1294), who is remembered on May 28 in the Episcopal Church, was a 13th century mystic and Beguine and the first to write in Low German. Her work was conversational but also theological, made up of dialogues between God and the soul and outlining ideas about the Trinity as they were communicated to her through her visions and mystical union with God.

Like many of our best known holy people, Mechthild is a notable figure at least in part because she renounced a noble birth for a life devoted to God, leaving home in her early 20s to join the semi-monastic community of women in Magdeburg (modern Saxony-Anhalt, Germany). By that time, she had already experienced visions of God for years, beginning at age 12, and these visions would form the foundation of her writings entitled The Flowing Light of Divinity. 

Mechthild’s writing is probably her strongest claim to fame in a conventional sense, but when I look at the full arc of her life, I am most struck by her critical streak. This was a woman who called wealthy religious leaders “stinking billy-goats.” She was no friend to these authorities, to the point that some called for her writings to be burned. And that’s where she really earns her poet bona fides, as far as I’m concerned.

A Holy Disruptor 

I know more than I first let on about the bold and wonderful peculiarities of poets. Though she’s currently studying to be a veterinarian, my wife also has an MFA in poetry and literary translation, and we’re known to joke that I have an honorary degree – writing, publishing, and reading manuscripts for a classmate’s small press. We hold conversations with fragments of history on the page and catch the music of strange technical terms. And, as much as we do anything else, we respond to injustice. 

Dante, whose depictions of hell may or may not have been influenced by Mechthild’s writings, weren’t just a literary project or an act of personal revenge, but rather when he placed corrupt individuals into his circles of hell, he was speaking out against injustice. More recently there have been literary coalitions like American Writers Against the Vietnam War, which included some prominent poets as W.S. Merwin and Adrienne Rich, and I would be remiss to write about the critical power of poetry without mentioning figures like Dr. Refaat Alareer, a poet and professor martyred in Gaza. Poets, Mechthild among them, do not let the status quo stand or injustice go unremarked upon, and neither do Christians. Of this calling she wrote: 

If you love the justice of Jesus Christ more than you fear human judgment then you will seek to do compassion. Compassion means that if I see my friend and my enemy in equal need, I shall help them both equally. Justice demands that we seek and find the stranger, the broken, the prisoner and comfort them and offer them our help. Here lies the holy compassion of God that causes the devils much distress.

Well, injustice causes God much distress, which is why Mechthild called for reform amongst her co-religionists, including the Dominicans, whom she joined in her later years. Her critiques were of particular note as a woman and, moreover, a woman writing not in scholarly Latin but in the vernacular.

Poets, it seems, never really change. I can hear Mechthild of Magdeburg’s words in “God Speaks to the Soul,” written in the 13th century alongside Muriel Rukeyser’s “Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)” (1968) and Refaat Alareer’s “If I Must Die” (2023) and hear in each the way love sings back, trying to reconcile each soul with the heart of heaven, despite a troubled world. 

Another of the great protest poets, Denise Levertov, wrote,

peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice

To love the justice of Jesus Christ more than we fear human judgement. That is what Mechthild tasked us with. That work is incomplete. Read a poem for me, will you? – with your children, with your parishes. Then, keep going. Do the work of the poets. Disrupt the peace of man to make God’s peace.