Henry Suso’s Doormat of Abandonment

Abstract

ABSTRACT 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.