Abstract

This chapter brings together literary studies and theological investigations in the field of Church History. It examines aspects of a Christian aesthetics as prevalent in the Middle Ages, focusing on Chapter II,25 of The Flowing Light of the Godhead, handed down under the name of Mechthild of Magdeburg and Meister Eckhartʼs Sermon 57. Christian aesthetics finds its place here somewhere between the concealment of a transcendent God and his becoming visible in the incarnation. With its rhetorical inventory, Chapter II,25 of the Flowing Light aims to achieve a performative comprehension of what is said in order to lead, qua identification, to the experience of unity (unio) with God. Even if the structure of argumentation in Meister Eckhartʼs Sermon 57 largely follows scholarly and learned guidelines and patterns, the goal here is also to convey and visualize the salvation of the biblical events in the here and now. In the tension between the religious reference to salvation and the linguistic design, whose mediating power is both doubted and celebrated, aesthetic processes of negotiation become tangible with great intensity. Therefore, this article aims to show how functionally bound texts, especially those claiming to mediate religious salvation, could become an outstanding site of aesthetic reflection in the pre-modern era.