The Convent of Helfta.
The great ideals of the world save themselves by strange disguises. Though the advance of progress threaten their existence, none the less they perpetuate themselves in unsuspected shelter. If to-day we see religion mask itself as devotion to humanity, it is but the reversal of the great masquerade of the Middle Ages, when whatever impulse of good-will to man was destined to survive assumed for safety’s sake the garb of the Church. Benevolence, science, logic, philosophy, and all the arts put on the hood and cowl. And the time came when love also entered religion. Indeed, the convent was the one safe place of refuge in a struggling, dark, chaotic world—a world for which centuries of careful nurture had ill-fitted the sentiment of love. The Middle Ages had existed, one might say, for its development. During the century succeeding the invention of the Immaculate Conception (1134), the cultus of the Virgin became dominant in the Church, and,pari passu, the position of women grew nobler in the world—was, indeed, elevated and spiritualized to a dangerous artificial beauty. Then a thousand devices were discovered to hide from the yet imperfect man and woman thebrutality of the one and the meanness of the other. The Courts of Love, where no husband might be the lover of his wife, the gross and strained devotion of the minnesingers, the worship of Mary and the saints, were expedients unreal or ugly in themselves, but they imposed on mere brutish passion a beautiful sentiment of reverence and service. For they showed the woman beloved as a creature aloof and apart, separated from the disenchantment of possession by the distance of heaven or the barriers of earth.
Thus through the Middle Ages love grew and flourished; a plant delicate yet and scarcely acclimatised, but watered and tendered and sheltered. Without this care it could not grow, being still young and not well-rooted. Then in the thirteenth century a terrible convulsion disturbed the world, and the fate of all tender, exquisite things hung for a while in awful balance. For in that eventful century, which rounds the old world and begins the new, the long-gathering jealousy of pope and emperor burst into a fearful storm. The tempest of over twenty years which destroyed the empire of the house of Hohenstaufen left Rome, though victorious, none the less a prey to her own champion, Charles of Anjou. For three years he would not suffer the election of a pope, holding the keys of Peter in his unrelaxing clutches; and even when the papal see was nominally filled, the Angevine adventurer guided its counsels and prompted its decrees. One shipwreck engulfed both papacy and empire, nor could any foresee that from those wrecks far nobler vessels should be built. The hierarchic and feudal order of things had fallen, andthe spirit of law and federation was yet unknown. All over Europe spread darkness and confusion: Rome was paralysed, France crazed with superstition and communistic panic, Italy a mere disorganised prey for the next comer; and Germany, most piteous of all, with the convert’s earnestness and the loyalty of a serf, not yet fit for the sudden withdrawal of the hierarchy and the feudalism to which she clung for support, Germany reeled heavily. It seemed that the end of the world was at hand; and truly, in this terrible interregnum, the whole fabric of the Middle Ages began to crack and gape in ominous ruin.
Now that the Courts of Love were wasted, his tournaments battle-fields, his minstrels shouting battle-cries, what had become of Love? Where should his ladies, sung so long and honoured, look for their knights? They are gone to fight for God and the king; they are gone far away, but no longer to the Holy Sepulchre; they are gone to ravage and ruin distant cities, or to lay low the power of Rome. Many never return; some after years—ten, fifteen, twenty years—come home again, tanned and grey—swearing troopers, whose talk is all of battle, whose camp jests and lewd stories fall like filth into the pure fountain of a woman’s soul. What knight is this for a delicate lady to love! She must change the very nature of her love if this shall satisfy her heart. The frail ideal, nourished so long with care and patience, must die, so it seems. But, as in ancient legends, where the lustful lover pursues a pure nymph, gaining hold upon her, stretching out his hands for the prize, to find them empty, to find her out ofreach, safe in the inviolable greenness of the laurel, even so the tender spirit of love, with one violent effort, set itself beyond the lusts of the imbruted world, sheltered, transformed into the mystical love of God.
A natural impulse was given to religion by the divisions and disasters of society. We have shown by what channels the mystical spirit of Alexandria permeated the religion of the West. The knight from his captors or his captives, the scholar from his studies, the monk from his perusal of the most popular of saintly authors, might all become imbued with a like spirit. Throughout the West there spread, partially, indeed, and not to all alike, a scorn of science and understanding, and a sense of mystery, an aspiration to ecstasy, a desire to merge all personality in the infinite. Such influences did not create, they did but direct the movement. They were—as M. Vacherot has shown us—a source of inspiration, a reserve of tradition for a natural instinct which, even without them, must have satisfied itself. Owing partly to these semi-religious influences, partly to the external condition of affairs, the movement—which might have established another School of Alexandria, might have believed in astrology or the philosopher’s stone, might have merely ended in jugglery and witchcraft—instead of this became a school for visionaries and ecstatics. How strong the movement was may be inferred by the length of its duration, and by our finding in its ranks not merely hysteric virgin saints, not merely the two priors of St. Victor, not merely the poetic Suso, the fervid Ruysbrock, the contemplativeTauler, but the wide intellect of Albertus Magnus, the strength of Eckhart, the practical wisdom of Gerson.
The doctrines of Neoplatonism, received through the medium of a saint, were translated into another sense by men of less intellect and stronger affections than the Alexandrines. Science is little to these later mystics, the inward spring of peace is much; they question with Bonaventura not doctrine but desire, not the human mind but heavenly grace. Not light they ask, but fire. By ecstasy they seek to unite themselves not only with the abstract wisdom, but with a supreme love. For ecstasy is to them thears amandi, and to them the one thing needful not intelligence, but feeling.“Amor oculus est,”says Richard of Saint Victor,“et amare videre est.”To behold with this eye the things that are hidden from earthly vision; to die to the world, in order to live to Christ; to lose one’s soul; to drown self, conscience, reason, virtue, feeling, in a flood of ecstasy, this had become the ambition of the nobler spirits of the world.
In this apotheosis of ecstasy, this contagion of love, the feminine element naturally predominated. The movement, which the gracious and pathetic figure of Elizabeth of Hungary announced, was to be, above all, a movement of women. Far beyond the glory of Eckhart and Gerson, above the eminence of thinker and teacher, shone, in this strange hierarchy of dreamers, the beatitude of the visionary and prophetess. Prophets of God some, others prophets of evil; so the Church decided. But it is hard to divide the spiritual abnegation of Bridget, of Catherine, ofthe two German Elizabeths, of Mechtild of Magdeburg, Gertrude and Mechtild von Hackeborn, from the heresy which declared that to the soul lost in God the sins of the body are as naught. That heresy is but the others’ holiness, pushed to its logical consequence.
The saints were chiefly women—women of vague, imperious, unsatisfied emotion, sick of a world given over to rapine, interdict, and slaughter, where no choice was left between disloyalty and damnation; women young and active, living for the most part the passive, temperate eventless life of the convent; women who imposed on themselves long fasts and vigils, whose tender flesh was bruised with the stone flags of the cell where they would lie of winter nights for penance, and torn with the lashings of the self-inflicted scourge. In this life no hope for them; in this world no love, no happiness, no possessions. As starving people dream of delicious feasts and banquets, they found in a vision the things withheld from them awake.
Amor rapit, unit, satisfacit: the practical Gerson lets fall the fiery phrase. Each of these virgin visionaries had said as much. Open the books of their exercises, their revelations; the dusty pages exhale a violence and tenderness of passion that the minnesingers never caught, the troubadors never felt, in their earthly singing. For these saintly visions are all of love—love which ravishes; nay, love which drowns, annihilates, swallows up. Love in a dream, and yet the one real thing in a cramped and narrow life; love which fills every interstice and cranny of avoid and aching heart; love unseen, untouched, unheard, for which the visionary waits hour by hour, in an anguish of tense devotion, waits till the muttered monotony of her prayers, the fixed, unvaried straining of her eyes, shall have lulled the body to a death-like trance, shall set free the soul to show her the mirage of her own unsatisfied desire.
Throughout the thirteenth century Thuringia continued the centre and stronghold of German sanctity. The life of St. Elizabeth at the Wartburg had gone up from its midst like a purifying altar-flame to heaven. When she died in 1231, hundreds of men and women came in tears to honour the wasted body wrapped in its worn Franciscan cloak, lying dead in the poor little house at Marburg. From the memory of her life, from the pilgrimages to her tomb, a tradition and ideal of saintliness spread among the people. Fifteen years later, it was in Thuringia that the Pope found his champion. Even his oppression, and the defeat and death of that ill-starred defender of the faith did little to abate the popular ardour.
The convent of Rodardesdorf, near Eisleben, and the great princely convent of Quedlinburg, gave an especial religious distinction to Thuringia; but not until about the year 1234, when the rich and noble Freiherr von Hackeborn of Helfta placed at Rodardesdorf his little five-year-old daughter Gertrude, was the specially illustrious future of that house decided. Rodardesdorf was a convent of Cistercians, a thoughtful and peaceful place. The little Gertrude washappy there. She was a serious and earnest child, “not content,” says the chronicle, “with childish innocence, but, even when a babe, gifted with a constant gravity and prudence of demeanour.” Indeed, that childish head was troubled with many things, for the little girl was passionately eager to learn all that came in her way: science, liberal arts, grammar, theology. So that she became no less honoured for her acquirements than beloved for her docility and modesty of bearing.
But the convent was to acquire another infant saint. The mother of Gertrude again visited the convent, and on one occasion brought with her her younger daughter, Mechtild, then seven years of age, and as many years younger than her sister. “They came for honest diversion,” says the chronicle, probably to see little Gertrude, and certainly with no thought of leaving Mechtild behind. But the child was so delighted with the strange place, the large rooms, the little cells, the chapel with its altar lights, the children in the garden, the nuns who made much of her, that she declared she would willingly remain there for ever. Nor would she leave, though her mother bade her come. Then the sisters, delighted with so much holiness so young, instantly beseeched the mother to leave her little girl in their company for awhile, and to this she consented. Poor mother, did no pang go through her heart when the convent doors shut on both her children? It was for ever; no prayers, no commands could bring her back her wilful, loving, eager little Mechtild any more, for theVitarelates, “after this holy and blessed embrace her parentscould never withdraw her from that place for all the caresses and endearments that they knew how to make.” With bruised ties and bleeding hearts the career of saintliness begins. “Only he,” runs the Scripture that child would often hear, “that hateth father and mother can become my disciple.”
Of the daily routine of life in the convent we may gain an idea from Abelard’s directions to the nuns of the Paraclete, and, setting against the difference of date the difference of culture in the two countries, we may not unfairly suppose the Thuringian Cistercians of 1250 to have followed much the same rule of life as the Benedictines of Heloise adopted a century earlier.
According to the code of Abelard the convent was divided into six functions, all alike subject to the direction of the abbess. The sacristan was responsible for the convent treasury; she kept the keys, and had the care of the church plate and sacred vessels; and it was her duty to set the virgin sisters to prepare the wafers for the Host, which must not be made by widows. The chantress taught singing and reading, had care of the choir and of the library, to which she was expected to add by copying and illuminating manuscripts. The head of the infirmary had charge of the sick. Another sister was mistress of the wardrobe, and responsible not only for all the spinning, weaving, and sewing necessary for the convent, but also for the tanning and cobbling. The cellarer had in her charge the wines for the altar and the sick, the provisioning of the table, and the management of whatever the convent possessed inorchards and garden-land, flocks and herds and hives, trout streams and mills. Lastly, the doorkeeper, who was especially chosen for courteous manners, judgment, and trustworthiness, was responsible for the keeping of the gate, the entertainment of guests, and the distribution of hospitality.
Life in the convent was not hard, but monotonous, eventless beyond description—a perpetual alternation of broken sleep, repeated tasks, and prayer. In the middle of the night the sisters rose for Matins, and the office over, trooped back through the darkness to the dormitory. There they slept till Lauds, which are sung at the break of day; in summer, when Lauds are early, the sisters slept again till Prime. At Prime they left the dormitory, having first washed their hands, and taking their books repaired to the cloister to read and sing until the office should begin. Service over, they all assembled in the chapter-house, where a lesson out of the Martyrology was read to them and expounded. On leaving the chapter each nun was sent to fulfil her allotted task—singing or sewing, nursing or baking—until the hour of Tierce, when mass was said. They then resumed their work till noon, the sixth hour, which was the convent dinner-time, except on fast-days, when it was postponed till Nones, or in Lent, when nothing was eaten till after Vespers at four. The convent fare was simple and spare. Save for the sick, no wine; stale bread of coarse flour; roots and greens, and at discretion of the abbess a portion of unflavoured meat on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. From the autumn equinox till Easter, on account of the shortnessof the days, this one meal was considered sufficient for all save the infirm.
After dinner, in summer-time, the sisters slept till Nones; in the two hours between that office and Vespers they were set to finish their task, but at four the day’s work was done. Between the spring and autumn equinoxes the sisters were permitted a light refreshment after Vespers. It was the only time when fruit might be eaten. This light supper over, Compline began. Then they all sought the dormitory again. On Saturday evenings they were a little later, as then the sisters were enjoined to purify themselves—that is to say, to wash their hands and feet, a function which the abbess or lay-sisters were specially directed to supervise. This done, they slept till the midnight matin-bell should clang them from their beds.
Out of such a life of dreary monotony, the same task day by day, or another exactly like it, the same prayer, the same lesson, always of saints and martyrs; out of this life of forced privation, this half-starved life of chants and broken dreams, who can wonder that (Μορφή μία) visions, mysteries, scandals, witchcraft continually arose. The two little children prospered in the convent which was at first merely a school for them, and an excellent school. Gertrude, the silent, studious, ambitious scholar, found there more books and better teachers than she could have had at home; and, so long as her soul was set on learning and studying, the homage paid her as a child set apart for God only served as a spur to her ambition. “She ever would increase her naturalbeauty of soul by saintly customs, adding to it the splendour and the sweetness of all manner of flowered virtues, so that she should be more pleasing in the eyes of every one,” says the chronicle in which after her death the nuns of Helfta embalmed her virtues. But while little Gertrude laboured so hard to make herself desirable, Mechtild, quite simply and without effort, won all hearts to herself. Although she was not so learned nor so grave as her sister, though once she had told a lie (the one lie of her life), boasting to her companions that she had seen a thief in the court, where thief was none; though, judging from a later vision, she had sometimes looked back from the plough and longed for her mother’s love: ay, though no early holiness had, as with Gertrude, foretold the saint, and only after her entrance to the convent had manifested itself in her; despite all this, Mechtild was the loved one. While Gertrude in the library was toiling hard at grammar that her mind might be worthy of God and the love of her companions, Mechtild standing in the garden was surrounded with listeners, hanging on the words of her fanciful allegories as she expounded the message of God. While Gertrude was making extracts from the Fathers and compiling treasuries of Scripture to help the souls of the sisterhood, Mechtild, like a little mother, was going among the sick, speaking, ministering to each, giving help and comfort to all in affliction. As they grew older it was still the same—Gertrude putting her soul into her studies, Mechtild into her life; Gertrude absorbed and wise, with no one friend preferred to any other; Mechtild everyone’s darling, beset with every one’s confidences “to the impediment of the sweet quiet of her soul.” Gertrude the humanist, Mechtild the human.
So far all was right and fair. Each child naturally selected the education fitted to its wants, and became wise or loving as the need was. But when they came to full girlhood they did not quit this school whose teaching they had outgrown. These girls were, since their childhood, cloistered nuns dedicated to God. But only when their childhood was over could they appreciate the meaning of their vow. To Mechtild it did not greatly matter; her life in the world might have been fuller and richer, in the convent it was not wasted. She was so easily interested in others, so gifted to soothe the sick and suffering, so naturally humble and unselfish, that even the consciousness of sanctity could not injure her nature; in her visions, even, she rarely announces her own glory. It is Gertrude that she sees in the bosom of the Father, and she hears the Divine Voice proclaim, “Gertrude is far greater than this Mechtild.” More often her visions are messages of consolation to those she has pitied and laboured for awake. She sees the dead baby of a certain sorrowing mother clad in scarlet and gold, and greatly glorified in heaven. She beholds God and the Virgin standing by the bed of one of the sisters who is sick unto death; or else her visions are tender and poetic fancies. She sees the Father giving all the saints to drink of the Fountain of Mercy. She seesthe Heart of God burning like a lamp; or, again, she beholds the sacred rose that blooms in the Heart of God; or, lastly, her visions supply the needs of her maimed and stinted life. Kneeling on the floor of her cell, this loving woman, with no natural ties, often sees God come to her as a little child of five years old, and, in a dream, God gives her His love, at last, to be her mother, “to care for her and lead her as a mother her child.” Or she dreams, this woman with her love of colour and beauty, of beautiful women in splendid raiment. Mary comes to her in a gown the colour of air, sewn all over with tiny flowers of gold, and embroidered round the neck and sleeves with the holy monogram of Jesus. Or she comes in a pale green cloak, latticed over with gold, with the head of Christ in every lattice. St. Catherine of Alexandria appears in dull crimson, covered over with gold embroidery of little wheels, fastened at the breast with a clasp of two meeting hands of gold. Christ appears young and beautiful, in rose-coloured silk, stiff with gold and jewels, “yet not to be thrown away because so heavy, but rather ennobled,” as the soul with the heavy gems of grief. Or she sees the least saint in Paradise, a youth of middle height, wonderfully lovely, most fair of face, his hair crisply curling, of a colour between green and white, clad all in green. Never, out of Meister Stefan’s pictures, were there such deep colours, such quaintly-patterned gowns and mantles, such jewels and embroideries as figure in the visions of this poor little sallow saint, asleep herself in her darned serge and yellowed linen, and always clad, by her own choice, in the worstclothes of the convent, torn and patched in all corners.
The real dangers of mysticism have little power over a soul so sweet and naïve as this. But it was otherwise with Gertrude. She was a woman of passionate intensity of imagination, of an ever-active and ambitious mind. During her childhood this had been wisely exercised in study. Had she gone then into the world life and learning would have employed it for her. Had she been a secular sister like Catherine of Siena, a wandering preacher and prophetess, like Mechtild of Magdeburg, or an avowedly learned and reforming abbess, like Heloise or Teresa, she would, perhaps, have been most useful and happiest of all. But, when she grew up, when she perceived the real aim of her cloistered life, her learning became odious to her. What had the vain lore of this world to do with the appointed spouse of Christ? “While this virgin was continuing the study of the humanities,” relates theVita, “she became aware that this study was a region too remote from the similitude of Christ, perceiving that too hungrily she had longed after human learning, for which reason she had not until that moment disposed her heart to receive Divine illumination. She knew then (and not without passionate sighs coming from the heart) that until this time she had been deprived both of the consolations and of the illuminations of Divine wisdom, since she had remained intent on human things.”
A terrible conflict, a terrible temptation. With Gertrude’s earnest nature there could be but one end.She cut off from her the hungry and passionate love of human learning as she would have cut off a limb or plucked out an eye to enter, maimed but holy, into Paradise. With tears, and anguish, and bitter agony of prayer, she maimed her soul. But not always does the mutilated member heal. Woe to those whom nature punishes for their temerity with mortification, with numb and creeping death.
Now that Gertrude had, of her own will, shut off from herself all her former means of progress and employment, how should she spend her time? She was not, like Mechtild, by nature a sick-nurse and a confidant; she had not, like Mechtild, a beautiful voice which she could cultivate for the service of God; and to her dominant eager nature it was necessary to do something and to do it better than any one else. The one remnant of all her studies which she permitted herself was the translation of Latin prayers into German for the benefit of more ignorant sisters, and at this she would persevere the whole day long. But this oft-repeated, almost mechanical employment could not fill her mind, could open no vista to her ambition. There was, indeed, only one road that she could follow; all the circumstances of her life converged to the same vanishing point.
When she remembered, in the long vacant hours of sleeping or copying, the books she used to read, what thoughts would they naturally suggest to her? She had, we may be sure, read no books that would give her visions of the world outside—poems of Virgil the magician, or the minnesingers. To her the humanities were themselves books of theology; the writingsof the fathers of the Church, a tract of St. Bonaventura’s it may be, or one of the sermons of Eckhart or of Albertus Magnus (then at the prime of their renown), certainly the works of Dionysius Areopagita. What would they have taught her, these books which she had given up to imitate the lowliness of Christ? They told her, one and all, how much more desirable was feeling than reason, ecstasy than care for others, faith than works; how far above all natural tenderness of human charity was thevirtus infusa, the theological virtue, the love of God. Every hour of her life must have repeated the lesson. The eight offices of the day, the lesson from theMartyrology, which was all the food this hungry and active mind was given to fast upon; the daily task of copying prayers; the long, weary misery of being no one, in no true position. All these things must have spoken to this earnest, self-preoccupied Gertrude, who had toiled so long to make herself pleasing in the eyes of every one; and, now, knowing so well what was necessary, would she not strive in prayer for this last, dearest gift? Would she not set herself to learn this one thing needful? Most likely she had not long to pray, nor ever consciously began to learn, before the gift was granted, the science acquired, the strong mind weakened and perverted, the student an ecstatic.
From that first moment of vision the fame of Gertrude grew so high and so rapidly, that when in 1251 the abbess of Rodardesdorf expired, this girl-ecstatic of nineteen was elected her successor. It is strangethat the duties of her new position, the great responsibilities of so famous a convent, did not draw her from her visions; but the influence of the time was strong, and the abbess of Rodardesdorf was beset by no imperious need for reform. There was no cleansing work of righteousness to be performed in that well-ordered house of high-born mystical ladies. All that Gertrude could do was, seven years after her nomination, when the springs of Rodardesdorf dried up, to remove the convent to her own castle of Helfta, an act which naturally increased her own position in the convent, and tripled her glory of abbess, benefactress, and ecstatic. Gertrude, however, was not the only saint in Helfta. Besides her sister, the sweet, fanciful Saint Mechtild, there was Gertrude the Nun,[3]sometimes confounded with the abbess, who in all probability wrote the concluding book of theVita, certainly finished after St. Gertrude’s death. The two daughtersof the Count of Mansfeld were also professed in the convent, and were gifted disciples of its mystical doctrines. Sophia spent her life in enriching the already valuable library of Helfta, and Elizabeth painted, probably in the chapel.
In 1265 the convent, already the high school of ecstasy in the north of Germany, received a more famous woman than any of these. This was our Mechtild of Magdeburg, whose earnest faith and flashing, passionate eloquence, whose songs inspired with a wild, strange tenderness, whose life of hardship and adventure for the love of Christ, had rendered her one of the noblest and most endearing figures of her age. She chose Helfta to be the home of her declining years, and added another glory to the convent of St. Gertrude and St. Mechtild.
Such a house, it may be supposed, did not exhaust the spiritual energies of a nature so full of force and so ambitious as that of its young abbess. Her surroundings were but an added incentive to her aspiring soul. She worked hard, it is true, aided by her sister Mechtild. Every day she visited the infirmary and saw that the sick were well and cleanly treated. She ruled her nuns with thought and care; but when the hours of leisure came, the many daily periods set apart for prayer and meditation, then her old ecstasy overpowered her with a strength and vividness the more forcible for the obstacles it had to overcome. More passionate, more personal become her revelations as she lies abandoned to trance and vision in the arms of the spiritual Lover. So strong, so hot, so fierce, so tender are the words that fall from her lips, thatwe cannot bear them now unmoved. Ah me! what vain and fruitless passion this dreaming love of the saint for a dream!
It was not until nine years after the bestowal of the “singular grace of divine familiarity,” says theVitathat Gertrude wrote down the description of her visions. But the visions, themselves recorded in the five books of her revelations, seem to have begun almost immediately after her renunciation of human learning. “From that time she began to hold as vile all visible and external things, and verily not without a cause, for from that time the Lord opened to her the ways of Mount Zion, a place of joy and consolation. Leaving the study of grammar, in which she was greatly instructed, she turned to theology, that is to say, Holy Scripture and the lives of the saints, using them with infinite diligence.”
And soon the saint herself began to speak from the mount, in her own language. None of the tender consolations and quaintly pictured fancies of Mechtild are here. The revelations of Gertrude manifest the ambition, the activity, the emotion of a crushed and passionate nature forced into an unnatural channel. Tragic and miserable spectacle: the strong passion, the earnest will so sorely wanted in the world outside, are spent vainly, vilely, in inducing terrible disease. The saint grows weaker as her visions increase in force; her mind, warped and broken, can bend but one way. And that way is towards inertia, madness, and annihilation. An old tale, oft-repeated, yet needed, perhaps, in these days of mesmerism and spiritualséances. An old tale, well-knownto the Yogis of India, to the monks and nuns of mediæval Europe, to all who have deliberately made themselves the victims of catalepsy and hysteria. For deliberately they did it. Many of the receipts have come down to us: the absolute cessation from practical affairs, the emptiness of mind and heart; the regulated diet, neither too little nor too much; the lack of sleep; the quiet, which no joy or woe of others may disturb, when, seated or kneeling in his cell, at an hour when digestion is well over, sighing lugubriously in deep, regular sighs, the eyes are fixed on one point too high or too low for perfect comfort, the arms are to beat the breast in monotonous routine, as Gerson and other mystical doctors prescribe, until a heavy trance involves the body, until the brain becomes deranged by this appalling and stultifying monotony, and creeping death or madness end the vision.
“It happened once,” says theVita, “that by reason of sickness, Gertrude was prevented from attending vespers; and, longing for these, and feeling sick at heart, she turned to the Lord, and said: ‘O my Master, were it not more praiseworthy that I should now be singing in the choir with my other companions and hearing the prayers and the other regular exercises than to be lying in this weakness, in which I consume in negligence so manyhours?’hours?’To which He answered: ‘Oh, dost thou believe the bridegroom holds his bride less dear, when he stayeth at home to taste the familiarity of his domestic pleasure, than when he glories to lead her forth, well adorned, before the gaze of the crowd?’ from which speech sheunderstood that, in the divine service, the soul appears as a bride going forth; but, when heavily laden with bodily infirmities, then as a bride sleeping in the secret chamber; for the more that man is weak, shorn of all pleasures of the sense, destitute and impotent, the more is he made to delight the Lord.”
Such a theory was naturally productive of fasts and vigils, nor, if the favour of her Lord depended on the sickness of her body, could it ever have been far from this poor ailing and anæmic girl. A revolting amount of suffering is naïvely and incidentally revealed in her works of spiritual grace. Scarce a chapter but opens, “Being again sorely weak from want of sustenance,” “Lying again in bed helpless with sickness,” “Being sorely oppressed with a burning of the liver,” or with some similar avowal of the connection between her revelations and the weakness of her health. Often she piteously implores the Lord to restore her to her former soundness and well-being, but the answer is always the same. “Thy sickness is a dance and a festival for me,” responds the Celestial Spouse; nor ever is there any hope given her of a cessation to her pain. In her wandering senses the poor tormented saint dimly guessed that her spiritual gifts were dependent on the utter prostration of her body and her mind.
The spectacle of her suffering convinced the whole convent of Gertrude’s sanctity. They believed her in daily communication with their unseen Head. It was natural, therefore, that they should bring their sorrows to her and entreat her intercession, as men aska minister to counsel the king, or a steward to remedy the carelessness of the absent master, or a favoured mistress to beg that, for her love’s sake, a piece of justice may be granted that otherwise were withheld. It was natural, also, that Gertrude should believe herself capable of guiding the will of God; natural that the strange vanity of the visionary and the hysteric should obscure the eyes of her mind, and lead her further on the road she had chosen. After visions, miracles.
Miracles exist in the mind of the witnesses.“Le miracle,”said Lamennais,“existe quand on y croit.”To the latter-day sceptic, the marvels which procured the canonization of Gertrude are such natural trifles that it is difficult to imagine they could ever have filled a whole countryside with rapture andthanksgivingthanksgiving. A sudden downfall of rain, the ceasing of a shower, the finding of a needle—such are her miracles. But hear with what pomp and circumstance the chronicler narrates them.
“One evening when the nuns had finished supper, they went into the court to finish a certain piece of work that they were set to do, and it happened that at this time the sun still shone, notwithstanding that in the sky there were several clouds which threatened rain; wherefore she, sighing, began heartily to converse with the Lord, I hearing all she said, as follows: ‘O Lord God, Creator of everything, I do not wish that thou, as if compelled, should obey the will of me unworthy; none the less would it be very dear tome, if pleasing to Thee, if Thy most liberal goodness shouldst prevail against Thine honest justice to retard a little, for my sake, this rain. None the less, Thy will be done.’ She said these latter words resigning herself into the hands of God, not thinking of aught but the fulfilment of His good pleasure; a marvellous thing it must certainly be accounted, that scarcely had she finished speaking when lightning, thunder, and great drops of rain burst forth with great fury; for which cause, moved with pity for the other sisters, she remained altogether filled with fear, and again she said to the Lord, ‘Let Thy goodness, O most clement God, last at least so long as while we finish our appointed task.’ At these words the most clement God, to show how in everything He was pleased to grant her prayer, held up the rain until the nuns had finished the task they were at work upon; which done, they returned to the convent, and scarcely had they reached the gate when there began a tempest of rain and thunder and lightning, so that some of the sisters who had lingered behind could not enter the door before they were soaked to the skin.”
Gertrude was the saint of the convent, and yet her ambition cannot have been wholly realized. She, who ever since her childhood had laboured hard to acquire “all manner of flowered virtues in order to please the eyes of every one,” she, the favoured of God, was nevertheless in the convent less belovedthan simple Mechtild. The fact is revealed unconsciously in every page of her life, in all the numerous revelations when God declares that notwithstanding the convent’s suffrage, Gertrude is greater than Mechtild. And greater she was—more passionate, strong, and earnest, suffering anguish and burning with great desires that her sweet and happy sister could not conceive. Love was necessary to her, love and approbation. They were the very food of her soul. Reading side by side her revelations and her life, one easily comprehends how in proportion as she failed to gain the love and tenderness of her companions, her visions become erotic and passionate. To give such a nature respect, esteem, awe, as a reward for its sacrifice, is in bitterest truth to give a stone to the child crying for bread. Gertrude being hungry dreamed of a feast; phantasmal banquets which nourish not, but madden.
As time went on, Gertrude transferred all her earnestness, all her powers of feeling, from the outer world to this dream-born inner life. Censorious, abstracted, caring little for physical suffering, she was tender and anxious to the last degree in all matters that concerned the soul. And this without any interest in the personality of the creature she longed to save. She had, says her biographer, not one friend so dear that to save her she would by so much as one word commit an offence against perfect justice, and would declare that rather would she consent to the injury of her own mother than harbour an evil thought against an enemy. Her conversation was in heaven, and the things of the world were asdust to her. Nay, as poison. She was as careful as Pascal[4]by no word of hers ever to draw to herself the heart of any person; it was not for her who was beloved of God to unite herself in earthly friendship, and as one would fly a person stricken with a pestilent disease, she fled from any one who sought her affection. Never now could she endure to hear a word of earthly love; rather would she remain deprived of the services and the goodwill of all the world than ever consent that, by reason of human favour the heart of any should be joined to hers.
So says the chronicle. Yet with all this bitter indifference, this love turned sour in her heart, she kept a great tenderness for erring or tormented souls, praying and watching for them, warning and consoling; and though the sinner proved obdurate, not yet would she relax her care; nay, when the sisters besought her not to afflict herself for the sins of theungodlyungodly, she would answer that she would rather suffer death than console herself for the misery of those who would only understand their own perdition when at last they should stand in face of the eternal expiation. So great was her compassion, that did she only hear of any one sick in spirit, be he never so far away, she could not rest without endeavouring to console his sorrow. And as men laid low with fever exist from day to day in the hope of recovery, watchingthemselves to see if they are not a little better, so she longed and watched from hour to hour that the Lord might console the mourner and ease him in his affliction.
Strange and pathetic this zeal for the indefinable and impersonal soul, concerning itself nowise with character or feeling, with mind or physical well-being. Strange and awful this transmuted love, this transformed humanity and kindness, which deal with unrealities while all around a world sickens and dies. Yet not so strange if we remember that to exchange the reality for the shadow, the thought for the dream, and truth for a phantasm, is the principle of mysticism.
Meanwhile Mechtild, a mystic by doctrine and circumstance, but not by temperament, concerned herself, even in the convent, chiefly with the affairs of reality. She was, as we have seen, every one’s friend, nurse, and confidant, and but slenderly concerned with saintly glories for herself. She never wrought any miracles, nor did God ever tell her that she was His most favoured among women. It was Gertrude’s glory that she declared. The saintly acts that are recorded of her have a pathetic human grotesqueness never to be found in Gertrude’s doings or sayings. For instance, out of a great pity for the sins of the mummers and dancers at carnival, she filled her bed full of potsherds and broken glass, and rolled in them till she was a mass of cuts and sores, begging God to accept her suffering as a set-off to the merry-makingof the world outside. This is not the true mystical temper, which ignores all but the union of the soul with God. Mechtild sought no advancement for her own soul, she sought to palliate the offences of the guilty and to save them from punishment rather than bring them to repentance; moreover she felt herself responsible for their errors. The true ecstatic, lost in God, abjures human responsibility. Nevertheless, even in the convent, Mechtild, with her merry patience in suffering, her care for the sick body no less than the sick soul, her humility and lovingness, was naturally dearer than her austere, abstracted sister-saint. And, none the less, the sisterhood was aware that Gertrude not Mechtild was their real title to honour.
As the mystical life spread like a contagion through the convent, many of the younger sisters, underfed, deprived of air and exercise, had not strength to support the abnormal existence of the visionary. Sickness was frequent in this convent of ecstatics, and whether at Rodardesdorf or at Helfta its mortality was excessive. The nuns died young of undefined diseases. We are always meeting allusions to their short, dream-visited lives, to their early and inexplicable dying. They perish of anæmia, before the acknowledgedly consumptive sisters; and the nuns can find no reason for their death unless it be that God was anxious to remove so much sweetness to flourish perpetually in His presence. The diseases of the convent are such physical ills as are induced by mental strain and by bodily inanition—consumption, hysteric convulsions, or paralysis, disturbances of the liver. Such as cannot die—such as, like Gertrudeherself, have too strong a fibre to perish in girlhood—linger, tormented by sickness, prematurely old and useless. All they have to console them is the phrase, vouchsafed by her heavenly bridegroom to Gertrude in vision, “Lo! ye that fain would hasten into my presence, ye are as a spouse that bare and unadorned would venture into the nuptial chamber; know, that after this death which ye so much desire, no further grace can accrue to the soul, nor can it suffer any more for God’s sake.”
Mechtild of Magdeburg, Dante’s Matilda, was the first of the greater saints to succumb. A long life of hardship, of energetic striving with a guilty world, years of Beguine Prophecy, much labour of writing and preaching, and the pain of bodily weariness, had worn her out. At the age of sixty-seven the strongest and sweetest of all the German women-mystics departed from a world which she had not shrunk to face, which even from her cloister she had striven to ennoble. The strong, reforming spirit was stilled at last. The one woman in the convent of Helfta who knew the world as it is, its sins and aspirations, its generosities and crimes, was dead. A window was shut in that house, a window showing the world beyond the chapel walls, and letting in upon the heavy smell of flickering candles and swinging censers the free breath of the wind. Henceforth there was no reminder of the larger world, the purer air outside: Mechtild of Magdeburg was dead.
VII.
No such release was appointed for Gertrude; the easy death of the body was not for her, though for death she prayed by day and by night, finding that her prayers for health and strength were never granted. Nailed to her mattress by exceeding weakness, she watched the younger nuns die, one by one, “admitted to the celestial marriage-chambers,” while she, faint, palsied, useless, lingered on. “O, my God,” she cries, “could I not serve Thee better with my old strength than thus?” And ever the soul-heard answer comes, that the more humbled the body, the poorer the proud intellect of man, so much the dearer to God is his spiritual essence. Thus dragged on year after year, and the great abbess filled her five books of revelations and her eight books of spiritual exercises. Her life was spent and she was old. The later hagiographers relate of Saint Gertrude that she died of a languor of Divine love. Modern science would call by another name this long palsy of the body through the prostration of the mind. But no diagnosis, saintly or scientific, can add to the sense of misery and waste with which we recall that strong life so early broken, those twenty-five years of strained nerves and aching limbs, that six-months-long daily death of hysterical paralysis.
“This elect of God,” relates theVita, “full of the Holy Spirit and worthy to be embraced by the arms of Divine charity, Gertrude, most benign abbess, all-praiseworthy, having laboured for forty years and asmany days in the honour and praise of God, ruling her abbey wisely and with much prudence, sweetly, and with much discretion, being by reason of all these virtues flowery as a fresh rose in this world, and marvellously gracious and worthy to be loved, not by God only, but by mankind as well, at last, after forty years and forty days, fell into a grievous sickness, which is known as minor palsy, a form of apoplexy.”
The narrators of the life, who knew Gertrude and had often seen her, say no word, it will be perceived, of the celestial love-sickness which a more sentimental taste gave out afterwards to be the cause of her death. And, indeed, such a superstition could not rise, even round so great a saint, while the physical details of her last weakness remained fresh in the minds of the nuns of Helfta. They mourned her truly, and believed that never a holier saint had been translated to those pleasant fields of heavenly green for which she had so often longed. But, with an admirablenaïveté, even while they believed that God had drawn her miraculously from her sick bed into His arms, they knew that she had died of palsy. To them there was nothing incongruous in the two ideas; they had no thought of concealing—they would rather display—the degradations and infirmities of the mere human body which had so long enchained the heavenly soul. At first her senses remained to her, only she could not move her limbs, could not stir the wasted hands that once had been so swift to sew, to write, to put in order whatever was out of place. She could lie still and dream, the poor, dying mystic.
For she had given to her now, as a gift that should not be taken away, that perfect quiescence and immobility of body which she had practised so often, so patiently, by day and night, in times gone past. And soon she was to be granted that other wing of ecstasy, complete abstraction of the mind from all human thoughts and affairs. So heavy became the burden of her infirmity that she could no longer order the affairs of the household, no longer care for others. At last she could not speak, she could not pray, she could not think. She was perfected in the mystical way; annihilated, stultified, palsied, she had attained the summit of her desire. Never moving, never changing, dead-alive, she lay there month by month, a helpless burden upon the community. Worshipped as one indeed highly favoured of the Lord by those whose feet were all set on the same sterile and deadly road, she could give utterance to no other words but these, “My soul!” And this phrase she repeated over and over again, finding it marvellously ample and sufficient to express all the movements of the spirit. O pitiless ideal, O cruel and revolting doctrine, is it to this you would reduce the living, thinking, active human mind? Is the end of such continued sacrifice, such years of hourly, daily labour nothing but this—a palsied useless body, a dumb, numb soul, with no thought and no desire beyond itself? At length the hour of dissolution was at hand, the night in which no man shall work; and in waiting for this the days of life had gone by fruitless and wasted; in hoping for this the sun had risen and set in vain, theseasons had changed unnoticed; in preparation for this soul and heart and mind and physical powers had deliberately hamstrung their noblest faculties; and now the long-awaited night was at hand, the night in which all mistakes are forgotten, all cares and anguish set at rest.
The last time that Gertrude spoke these two all-sufficing words, “My soul!” was one evening when Compline was at an end. Then began her passage to the other life. At this time, fables the author of the end of theVita, in quaint allegorical eulogy, not only the chamber of the dying abbess, but the whole of the monastery, was crowded and thronged to excess, since among the praying and weeping sisterhood knelt all the virgin company of heaven.
“At length the happy hour was come when the Celestial and Imperial Spouse should receive His beloved in His house of love, finally, after so much longing, set free of the prison of the world.” The nuns knelt round praying and weeping; the watching sisters saw angels kneeling too. And we, do we not see the ghosts of stillborn pity, and joy, and love, and help, standing white-eyed and shadowy there? Yet wherefore should all or any weep? The end is at hand; the labour is over and gone, and soon she will rest so well that, even if she could, she would not quit her quiet bed. Well may she sleep, poor, troubled soul, mistaken and most noble in its errors; well may she sleep who, being dead, yet speaks with a clearer and surer voice than she spoke with on earth, telling of patience and sacrifice borne willingly for love’s sake, of faithful endurance through painand toil, teaching an example and a warning in one word. And in the middle of their praying none heard at what moment the sleeping spirit went. The abbess was dead; but the convent went on as though she had been still alive. Another abbess took her place; another nun saw visions and worked miracles in her stead, a lesser saint but of the same quality. Even after Mechtild’s death some years after, the old life went on—the old routine of sleep and prayer, or of forced wakeful nights and baneful ecstasy; and the old life of insufficient food and insufficient thought begot the old aberrations and diseases. The fever had not yet run its course.
We standing here, safe, as we imagine, from the deadly epidemic, curiously studying these eight hundred closely printed pages as records of morbid hysteria, may feel our hearts melt with a melancholy regret for the shipwreck of so many noble lives. For the worst of this malady was that it attacked the loftiest spirits, as phylloxera the oldest and most fruitful vines. We may pity and praise them in a breath; we may give a kindly wonder to their belated love and say that, but for them, the sentiments that fills our hearts to-day would have been less patient, less tender, less exalted. And this is well, that we should honour the best in them. But let us take care that we ourselves are free and whole; let us not deem ourselves too safe, but place a quarantine on our own souls lest the sweet and fatal poison of mysticism penetrate thither unawares.