Henry Suso's Doormat of Abandonment
This article explores how Henry Suso, while advancing along his mystic and mystagogic path, encounters and embraces a doormat that both inspires and inhibits his practice of the abandonment that it betokens. It argues that, by affectively clinging onto this token, rather than giving it away to Elsbe...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Penn State Univ. Press
2023
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| In: |
Journal of medieval religious cultures
Year: 2023, Volume: 49, Issue: 2, Pages: 195-231 |
| IxTheo Classification: | CB Christian life; spirituality KAF Church history 1300-1500; late Middle Ages |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | This article explores how Henry Suso, while advancing along his mystic and mystagogic path, encounters and embraces a doormat that both inspires and inhibits his practice of the abandonment that it betokens. It argues that, by affectively clinging onto this token, rather than giving it away to Elsbeth Stagel to alleviate her suffering, Suso displays how unexemplary he remains in the task of abandoning himself. His unexemplary behavior contrasts not only with Stagel's handcrafting and distributing copies of his carved-out IHS monogram, but also with her advancement, before him and beyond his guidance, into the naked Godhead. The exposure of these deficiencies in his exemplarity accentuates not only how the servant of eternal Wisdom functions as an aspirational figure for Suso, but also how the crucified Christ alone, in his total and unsurpassable abandonment to God and by God, serves as the exemplar of exemplars. In being progressively conformed to the self-emptying and self-emptied Jesus, Suso is summoned to abandon even his self-constructed "abandoned" self. |
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| ISSN: | 2153-9650 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of medieval religious cultures
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