CHALLENGES AND INFLUENCE OF THE “RHINE MYSTICISM” IN THE FORMATION OF A NEW EUROPEAN IDENTITY

Abstract

The article examines the challenges of spiritual life in the late Middle Ages when people, unsatisfied with external ritualized expression, began searching for an individual «religious experience» that had an immediate, internal, and personal impact, the subject of which is God. This massive change in lifestyle to attain these «religious experiences» appears as a reflection of the gradual decay of the feudal system and the birth of a new society, and indicating the incipience of a particular secular spirituality nurtured by monastic ascetic ideals, having broken its bonds with monastic institutions. These movements' informal nature controversialized the existing church hierarchy through the many doctrinal and customary deviations from the Christian Magisterium. Firstly, the area around which this movement was located was the center of the European civilization itself ‒ the territory «on the Rhine». The secular movements of Beguines and Beghards appeared in the 12th century, and in the 13th-14th centuries, they had considerable development; around them, a corresponding spirituality was formed, similar to the «pantheistic» vision of God and the world. The complicated processes of forming a new (modern) European identity featured prominent individualism and emancipation of the subject, with the change of view on religiosity, resulting in a «Rhine mysticism». Emerging are some significant authors who wanted to influence this secular movement differently: not like the Inquisition, which wanted to eliminate this movement, but to guide it wisely. This way, the «Rhine mysticism» participated in the social changes in the territories called «supra-Rhine» from the 13th to the 15th centuries. While on the one hand, the representatives of the «Rhine mysticism» criticized certain parts of this process, they also participated in its design, which appeared as a process of transforming the collective-ritual approach to religiosity into a radical, individual, and internal approach. Interestingly, such an identity, which has since dissociated itself from religiosity altogether, was in the early late Middle Ages rather a change in how one experienced religion.