Mystic · Medieval
St. Gertrude the Great
1256–c. 1302 · Helfta; Benedictine liturgical mysticism
Never formally canonized; her cult was approved in the seventeenth century and her feast (16 November) extended to the whole Latin Church by Clement XII in 1738. The only woman the Church calls “the Great.”
Given to the nuns of Helfta in Saxony at the age of four, Gertrude became a fine Latinist and, by her own account, a lover of secular learning, until a vision of Christ at twenty-five turned her, as her sisters put it, “from a grammarian into a theologian.” Her visions almost all come during the Divine Office and the Mass, and her Herald of Divine Love joins frequent Communion, devotion to the wounded Heart of Christ and the liturgical year into one life of prayer. Her Spiritual Exercises are a sequence of prayers built on the Church's own rites, renewing baptism, religious profession and the soul's espousal.
Why he matters: An early witness to devotion to the Sacred Heart, and the purest example of a mysticism that grows out of the liturgy rather than alongside it; Dom Guéranger and the liturgical movement took her as a model.
Reading
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The Herald of Divine LoveSt. Gertrude the Great (trans. Margaret Winkworth), 1993 · Book II is her own; the other books were compiled by the Helfta nuns.
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Spiritual Exercises (Exercitia Spiritualia)St. Gertrude the Great (trans. Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis), 1989 · Seven exercises built on the rites of baptism, profession and the consecration of virgins.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.