There are two documents which are both (the one with much reason and the

other with certainty) ascribed to Francis. Utterly different as they are,

each still remains a clear expression of his spirit. The one is the Lauds,

commonly called the Canticle of the Brother Sun, and the other is the

saint’s last Testament. One may think of the Canticle as the closing

stanza of a life which was an enacted poem:

Most High, omnipotent, good Lord, thine is the praise, the glory, the

honour and every benediction;

To thee alone, Most High, these do belong, and no man is worthy to

name thee.

Praised be thou, my Lord, with all thy creatures, especially milord

Brother Sun that dawns and lightens us;

And he, beautiful and radiant with great splendour, signifies thee,

Most High.

Be praised, my Lord, for Sister Moon and the stars that thou hast made

bright and precious and beautiful.

Be praised, my Lord, for Brother Wind, and for the air and cloud and

the clear sky and for all weathers through which thou givest

sustenance to thy creatures.

Be praised, my Lord, for Sister Water, that is very useful and humble

and precious and chaste.

Be praised, my Lord, for Brother Fire, through whom thou dost illumine

the night, and comely is he and glad and bold and strong.

Be praised, my Lord, for Sister, Our Mother Earth, that doth cherish

and keep us, and produces various fruits with coloured flowers and the

grass.

Be praised, my Lord, for those who forgive for love of thee, and

endure sickness and tribulation; blessed are they who endure in peace;

for by thee, Most High, shall they be crowned.

Be praised, my Lord, for our bodily death, from which no living man

can escape; woe unto those who die in mortal sin.

Blessed are they that have found thy most holy will, for the second

death shall do them no hurt.

Praise and bless my Lord, and render thanks, and serve Him with great

humility.[547]

The self-expression of the more personal parts of the Testament supplement

these utterances:

“Thus the Lord gave to me, Brother Francis, to begin to do penance:

because while I was in sins, it seemed too bitter to me to see lepers;

and the Lord himself led me among them, and I did mercy with them. And

departing from them, that which seemed to me bitter, was turned for me

into sweetness of soul and body. And a little afterwards I went out of

the world.

“And the Lord gave me such faith in churches, that thus simply I

should pray and say: ‘We adore thee, Lord Jesus Christ, and in all thy

churches which are in the whole world, and we bless thee, because

through thy holy cross thou hast redeemed the world.’

“Afterwards the Lord gave and gives me so great faith in priests who

live after the model of the holy Roman Church according to their

order, that if they should persecute me I will still turn to them. And

if I should have as great wisdom as Solomon had, and should have found

the lowliest secular priests in the parishes where they dwell, I do

not wish to preach contrary to their wish. And them and all others I

wish to fear and honour as my lords; and I do not wish to consider sin

in them, because I see the Son of God in them and they are my lords.

“And the reason I do this is because corporeally I see nothing in this

world of that most high Son of God except His most holy body and most

holy blood, which they receive and which they alone administer. And I

wish these most holy mysteries to be honoured above all and revered,

and to be placed together in precious places. Wherever I shall find

His most holy names and His written words in unfit places, I wish to

collect them, and I ask that they be collected and placed in a proper

place; and all theologians and those who administer the most holy

divine words, we ought to honour and venerate, as those who administer

to us spirit and life.

“And after the Lord gave me brothers, no one showed me what I ought to

do, but the Most High himself revealed to me that I ought to live

according to the model of the holy Gospel. And I in a few words and

simply had this written, and the lord Pope confirmed it to me. And

they who were coming to receive life, all that they were able to have

they gave to the poor; and they were content with one patched cloak,

with the cord and breeches; and we did not wish to have more. We who

were of the clergy said our office as other clergy; the lay members

said ‘Our Father.’ And willingly we remained in churches; and we were

simple (_idiotae_) and subject to all. And I laboured with my hands,

and I wish to labour; and I wish all other brothers to labour. Who do

not know how, let them learn, not from the cupidity of receiving the

price of labour, but on account of the example, and to repel

slothfulness. And when the price of labour is not given to us, we

resort to the table of the Lord by seeking alms from door to door.

“The Lord revealed to me a salutation that we should say: The Lord

give thee peace.”

Francis’s precepts for the brothers follow here. The last paragraph of

the Will is: “And whoever shall have observed these principles, in

heaven may he be filled with the benediction of the most high Father,

and on earth may he be filled with the benediction of His beloved Son,

with the most holy spirit Paraclete, and with all the virtues of the

heavens and with everything holy. And I, Brother Francis, your very

little servant, so far as I am able, confirm to you within and without

that most holy benediction.”

CHAPTER XIX

MYSTIC VISIONS OF ASCETIC WOMEN

ELIZABETH OF SCHÖNAU; HILDEGARD OF BINGEN; MARY OF OGNIES; LIUTGARD OF

TONGERN; MECHTHILD OF MAGDEBURG

We pass to matters of a different complexion from anything presented in

the last few chapters. Thus far, besides Bernard and Francis, matchless

examples of monastic ideals, there have been instances of contemplation

and piety, with much emotion, and a sufficiency of experience having small

part in reason; also hallucinations and fantastic conduct, as in the case

of Romuald. The last class of phenomena, however, have not been prominent.

Now for a while we shall be wrapt in visions, rational, imitative,

fashioned with intent and plan; or, again, directly experienced,

passionate, hallucinative. They will range from those climaxes of the

constructive or intuitive imagination,[548] which are of the whole man, to

passionate or morbid delusions representing but a partial and passing

phase of the subject’s personality. Moreover, we have been occupied with

hermits and monks, that is to say, with men. The present chapter has to do

with nuns; who are more prone to visions, and are occasionally subject to

those passionate hallucinations which are prompted by the circumstance

that the Christian God was incarnate in the likeness of a man.

Besides the conclusions which the mind draws from the data of sense, or

reaches through reflection, there are other modes of conviction whose

distinguishing mark is their apparent immediacy and spontaneity. They are

not elicited from antecedent processes of thought, as inferences or

deductions; rather they loom upon the consciousness, and are experienced.

Yet they are far from simple, and may contain a multiplicity of submerged

reasonings, and bear relation to countless previous inferences. They are

usually connected with emotion or neural excitement, and may even take the

guise of sense-manifestations. Through such convictions, religious minds

are assured of God and the soul’s communion with Him.[549] While not

issuing from argument, this assurance may be informed with reason and

involve the total sum of conclusions which the reasoner has drawn from

life.

In devout mediaeval circles, the consciousness of communion with God, with

the Virgin, with angels and saints, and with the devil, often took on the

semblance of sense-perception. The senses seemed to be experiencing:

stenches of hell, odours of heaven, might be smelled, or a taste infect

the mouth; the divine or angelic touch was felt, or the pain of blows;

most frequently voices were heard, and forms were seen in a vision. In

these apparent testimonies of sight and hearing, the entire spiritual

nature of the man or woman might set the vision, dramatize it with his or

her desires and aversions, and complete it from the store of knowledge at

command.

The visions of an eleventh-century monk named Othloh have been observed at

some length.[550] Intimate and trying, they were also, so to speak, in and

of the whole man: his tastes, his solicitudes, his acquired knowledge and

ways of reasoning, joined in these vivid experiences of God’s truth and

the devil’s onslaughts. One may be mindful of Othloh in turning to the

more impersonal visions of certain German nuns, which likewise issued

from the entire nature and intellectual equipment of these women.[551]

On the Rhine, fifteen miles north-east of Bingen, lies the village of

Schönau, where in the twelfth century flourished a Benedictine monastery,

and near it a cloister for nuns. At the latter a girl of twelve named

Elizabeth was received in the year 1141. She lived there as nun, and

finally as abbess, till her death in 1165. Like many other lofty souls

dwelling in the ideal, she was a stern censor of the evils in the world

and in the Church. The bodily infirmities from which she was never free,

were aggravated by austerities, and usually became most painful just

before the trances that brought her visions. Masses and penances, prayer

and meditation, made her manner of approach to these direct disclosures of

eternity, wherein the whole contents of her faith and her reflection were

unrolled. Frequently she beheld the Saints in the nights following their

festivals; her larger visions were moulded by the Apocalypse. These

experiences were usually beatific, though sometimes she suffered insult

from malignant shapes. What humility bade her conceal, the importunities

of admirers compelled her to disclose: and so her visions have been

preserved, and may be read in the _Vita_ written by her brother Eckbert,

Abbot of Schönau.[552] Here is an example of how the saint and seeress

spoke:

“On the Sunday night following the festival of St. James (in the year

1153), drawn from the body, I was borne into an ecstasy (_avocata a

corpore rapta sum in exstasim_). And a great flaming wheel flared in

the heaven. Then it disappeared, and I saw a light more splendid than

I was accustomed to see; and thousands of saints stood in it, forming

an immense circle; in front were some glorious men, having palms and

shining crowns and the titles of their martyrdoms inscribed upon their

foreheads. From these titles, as well as from their pre-eminent

splendour, I knew them to be the Apostles. At their right was a great

company having the same shining titles; and behind these were others,

who lacked the signs of martyrdom. At the left of the Apostles shone

the holy order of virgins, also adorned with the signs of martyrdom,

and behind them another splendid band of maidens, some crowned, but

without these signs. Still back of these, a company of venerable women

in white completed the circle. Below it was another circle of great

brilliancy, which I knew to be of the holy angels.”

“In the midst of all was a Glory of Supreme Majesty, and its throne

was encircled by a rainbow. At the right of that Majesty I saw one

like unto the Son of Man, seated in glory; at the left was a radiant

sign of the Cross.... At the right of the Son of Man sat the Queen of

Kings and Angels on a starry throne circumfused with immense light. At

the left of the Cross four-and-twenty honourable men sat facing it.

And not far from them I saw two rams sustaining on their shoulders a

great shining wheel. The morning after this, at terse, one of the

brothers came to the window of my cell, and I asked that the mass for

the Holy Trinity might be celebrated.

“The next Sunday I saw the same vision, and more: for I saw the Lamb

of God standing before the throne, very lovable, and with a gold

cross, as if implanted in its back. And I saw the four Evangelists in

those forms which Holy Scripture ascribes to them. They were at the

right of the Blessed Virgin, and their faces were turned toward her.”

And Elizabeth saw the Virgin arise and advance from out the great light

into the lower ether, followed by a multitude of women saints, and then

return amid great praise.

In another vision she saw the events of the Saviour’s last days on earth:

saw Him riding into Jerusalem, and the multitude throwing down branches;

saw Him washing the disciples’ feet, then the agony in the garden, the

betrayal, the crowning with thorns, the spitting, the Lord upon the Cross,

and the Mother of God full of grief; she saw the piercing of His side, the

dreadful darkness,--all as in Scripture, and then the Scriptural incidents

following the Resurrection. Upon this, her vision took another turn, and

words were put in her mouth to chastise the people for their sins.

Apparently more original was Elizabeth’s vision of the _Paths of God_ (the

_Viae Dei_). In it three paths went straight up a mountain from opposite

sides, the first having the hyacinthine hue of the deep heaven; the second

green, the third purple. At the top of the mountain was a man, clad with a

hyacinthine tunic, his reins bound with a white girdle; his face was

splendid as the sun, his eyes shone as stars, and his hair was white; from

his mouth issued a two-edged sword; in his right hand he held a key and

in his left a sceptre. Elizabeth interprets: the man is Christ; and the

mountain represents the loftiness of celestial beatitude; the light at the

top is the brightness of eternal life; the three paths are the diverse

ways in which the elect ascend. The hyacinthine path is that of the _vita

contemplativa_; the green path is that of the religious _vita activa_; and

the purple path is the way of the blessed martyrs.

There were also other paths up the mountain, one beset with brambles until

half way up, where they gave place to flowers. This is the way of married

folk, who pass from brambles to flowers when they abandon the pleasures of

the flesh; for the flowers are the virtues which adorn a life of

continence. Still other ways there were, for prelates, for widows, and for

solitaries. And Elizabeth turns her visions into texts, and preaches

vigorous sermons, denouncing the vices of the clergy as well as laity. In

other visions she had seen prelates and monks and nuns in hell.

The visions of this nun appear to have been the fruit of the constructive

imagination working upon data of the mind. Yet she is said to have seen

them in trances, a statement explicitly made in the account of those last

days when life had almost left her body. Praying devoutly in the middle of

the night before she died, she seemed much troubled; then she passed into

a trance (_exstasim_). Returning to herself, she murmured to the sister

who held her in her arms: “I know not how it is with me; that light which

I have been wont to see in the heavens is dividing.” Again she passed into

a trance, and afterwards, when the sisters begged her to disclose what she

had seen, she said her end was at hand, for she had seen holy visions

which, many years before, God’s angel had told her she should not see

again until she came to die. On being asked whether the Lord had comforted

her, she answered, “Oh! what excellent comfort have I received!”

* * * * *

A more imposing personality than Elizabeth was Hildegard of Bingen,[553]

whose career extends through nearly the whole of the twelfth century; for

she was born in 1099 and died in 1179. Her parents were of the lesser

nobility, holding lands in the diocese of Mainz. A certain holy woman, one

Jutta, daughter of the Count of Spanheim, had secluded herself in a

solitary cell at Disenberg--the mount of St. Disibodus--near a monastery

of Benedictine monks. Drawn by her reputation, Hildegard’s parents brought

their daughter to Jutta, who received her to a life like her own. The

ceremony, which took place in the presence of a number of persons, was

that of the last rites of the dead, performed with funeral torches.

Hildegard was buried to the world. She was eight years old. At the same

time a niece of Jutta also became a recluse, and afterwards others joined

them.

On the death of Jutta in 1136, Hildegard was compelled to take the office

of Prioress. But when the fame of the dead Jutta began to draw many people

to her shrine, and cause a concourse of pilgrims, Hildegard decided to

seek greater quiet, and possibly more complete independence; for the

authority of the new abbot at the monastery may not have been to her

liking. She was ever a masterful woman, better fitted to command than to

obey. So in 1147 she and her nuns moved to Bingen, and established

themselves permanently near the tomb of St. Rupert. From this centre the

energies and influence of Hildegard, and rumours of her visions, soon

began to radiate. Her advice was widely sought, and often given unasked.

She corresponded with the great and influential, admonishing dukes and

kings and emperors, monks, abbots, and popes. Her epistolary manner

sometimes reminds one of Bernard, who was himself among her

correspondents. The following letter to Frederick Barbarossa would match

some of his:

“O King, it is very needful that thou be foreseeing in thy affairs.

For, in mystic vision, I see thee living, small and insensate, beneath

the Living Eyes (of God). Thou hast still some time to reign over

earthly matters. Therefore beware lest the Supreme King cast thee down

for the blindness of thine eyes, which do not rightly see how thou

holdest the rod of right government in thy hand. See also to it that

thou art such that the grace of God may not be lacking in thee.”[554]

This is the whole letter. Hildegard’s communications were not wont to

stammer. They were frequently announced as from God, and began with the

words “Lux vivens dicit.”

Hildegard was a woman of intellectual power. She was also learned in

theology, and versed in the medicine and scanty natural science of an

epoch which preceded the reopening of the great volume of Aristotelian

knowledge in the thirteenth century. Yet she asserts her illiteracy, and

seems always to have employed learned monks to help her express, in

awkward Latin, the thoughts and flashing words which, as she says, were

given her in visions. Her many gifts of grace, if not her learning,

impressed contemporaries, who wrote to her for enlightenment upon points

of doctrine and biblical interpretation; they would wait patiently until

she should be enabled to answer, since her answers were not in the power

of her own reflection, but had to be seen or heard. For instance, a monk

named Guibert, who afterwards became the saint’s amanuensis and

biographer, propounded thirty-eight questions of biblical interpretation

on behalf of the monks of the monastery of Villars. In the course of time

Hildegard replies: “In visione animae meae, haec verba vidi et audivi,”

and thereupon she gives a text from Canticles with an exposition of it,

which neither she nor the monks regarded quite as hers, but as divinely

revealed. At the end of the letter she says that she, insignificant and

untaught creature, has looked to the “true light,” and through the grace

of God has laboured upon their questions and has completed the solutions

of fourteen of them.[555]

In some of Hildegard’s voluminous writings, visions were apparently a form

of composition; again, more veritable visions, deemed by her and by her

friends to have been divinely given, made the nucleus of the work at

length produced by the labour of her mind. Guibert recognized both

elements, the God-given visions of the seeress and her contributory

labour. In letters which had elicited the answers above mentioned, he

calls her _speculativa anima_, and urges her to direct her talents

(_ingenium_) to the solution of the questions. But he also addresses her

in words just varied from Gabriel’s and Elizabeth’s to the Virgin:

“Hail--after Mary--full of grace; the Lord is with thee; blessed art

thou among women, and blessed is the word of thy mouth.... In the

character of thy visions, the logic of thy expositions, the orthodoxy

of thy opinions, the Holy Spirit has marvellously illuminated thee,

and revealed to babes divers secrets of His wisdom.”[556]

In answer to more personal inquiries from the deeply-interested Guibert,

Hildegard (who at the time was venerable in years and in repute for

sanctity) explains how she saw her visions, and how her knowledge of

Scripture came to her:

“From infancy, even to the present time when I am more than seventy

years old, my soul has always beheld this _visio_,[557] and in it my

soul, as God may will, soars to the summit of the firmament and into a

different air, and diffuses itself among divers peoples, however

remote they may be. Therefore I perceive these matters in my soul, as

if I saw them through dissolving views of clouds and other objects. I

do not hear them with my outer ears, nor do I perceive them by the

cogitations of my heart, or by any collaboration of my five senses;

but only in my soul, my eyes open, and not sightless as in a trance;

wide awake, whether by day or night, I see these things. And I am

perpetually bound by my infirmities and with pains so severe as to

threaten death, but hitherto God has raised me up.

“The brightness which I see is not limited in space, and is more

brilliant than the luminous air around the sun, nor can I estimate its

height or length or breadth. Its name, which has been given me, is

Shade of the living light (_umbra viventis luminis_). Just as sun,

moon, or stars appear reflected in the water, I see Scripture,

discourses, virtues and human actions shining in it.

“Whatever I see or learn in this vision, I retain in my memory; and as

I may have seen or heard it, I recall it to mind, and at once see,

hear, know; in an instant I learn whatever I know. On the other hand,

what I do not see, that I do not know, because I am unlearned; but I

have had some simple instruction in letters. I write whatever I see

and hear in the vision, nor do I set down any other words, but tell my

message in the rude Latin words which I read in the vision. For I am

not instructed in the vision to write as the learned write; and the

words in the vision are not as words sounding from a human mouth, but

as flashing flame and as a cloud moving in clear air.

“Nor have I been able to perceive the form of this brightness, just as

I cannot perfectly see the disk of the Sun. In that brightness I

sometimes see another light, for which the name _Lux vivens_ has been

given me. When and how I see it I cannot tell; but sometimes when I

see it, all sadness and pain is lifted from me, and then I have the

ways of a simple girl and not those of an old woman.”[558]

The obscure Latin of this letter gives the impression of one trying to put

in words what was unintelligible to the writer. And the same sense of

struggle with the inadequacies of speech comes from the prologue of a work

written many years before:

“Lo, in the forty-third year of my temporal course, while I, in fear

and trembling, was intent upon the celestial vision, I saw a great

splendour in which was a voice speaking to me from heaven: Frail

creature, dust of the dust, speak and write what thou seest and

hearest. But because that thou art timid of speech and unskilled in

writing, speak and write these things not according to human utterance

nor human understanding of composition; but as thou seest and hearest

in the heavens above, in the marvels of God, so declare, as a hearer

sets forth the words of his preceptor, preserving the fashion of his

speech, under his will, his guidance and his command. Thus thou, O man

(_homo_), tell those things which thou seest and hearest, and write,

not according to thyself or other human being, but according to the

will of Him who knows and sees and disposes all things in the secrets

of His mysteries.

“And again, I heard a voice saying to me from heaven: Tell these

marvels and write them, taught in this way, and say: It happened in

the year one thousand one hundred and forty-one of the incarnation of

Jesus Christ the Son of God, when I was forty-two years old, that a

flashing fire of light from the clear sky transfused my brain, my

heart, and my whole breast as with flame; yet it did not burn but only

warmed me, as the sun warms an object upon which it sheds its rays.

And suddenly I had intelligence of the full meaning of the Psalter,

the Gospels, and the other books of the Old and New Testaments,

although I did not have the exact interpretation of the words of their

text, nor the division of syllables nor knowledge of cases and moods.”

The writer continues with the statement:

“The visions which I saw, I did not perceive in dreams or sleeping,

nor in delirium, nor with the corporeal ears and eyes of the outer

man; but watchful and intent in mind I received them according to the

will of God.”[559]

Hildegard spoke as truthfully as she could about her visions and the

source of her knowledge, matters hard for her to put in words, and by no

means easy for others to classify in categories of seeming explanation.

Guibert may have read the work in question. At all events, his interesting

correspondence with her, and her great repute, led him to come to see for

himself and investigate her visions; for he realized that deceptions were

common, and wished to follow the advice of Scripture to prove all things.

So he made the journey to Bingen, and stayed four days with Hildegard.

This was in 1178, about a year before her death. “So far as was possible

in this short space of time, I observed her attentively; and I could not

perceive in her any invention or untruth or hypocrisy, or indeed anything

that could offend either us or other men who follow reason.”[560]

Springing from her rapt faith, the visions of this seeress and _anima

speculativa_ disclose the range of her knowledge and the power of her

mind. The visions all were allegories; but while some appear as sheer

spontaneous visions, in others the mind of Hildegard, aware of the

intended allegorical significance, constructs the vision, and fashions its

details to suit the spiritual meaning. This woman, fit sister to her

contemporaries Hugo of St. Victor and Bernard of Clairvaux, was ancestress

of him who saw his _Commedia_ both as fact and allegory, and with intended

mind laboured upon that inspiration which kept him lean for twenty years.

Let us now follow these visions for ourselves, and begin with the _Book of

the Rewards of Life_ revealed by the Living Light through a simple

person.[561]

“When I was sixty years old, I saw the strong and wonderful vision

wherein I toiled for five years. And I saw a Man of such size that he

reached from the summit of the clouds of heaven even to the Abyss.

From his shoulders upward he was above the clouds in the serenest

ether. From his shoulders down to his hips he was in a white cloud;

from his hips to his knees he was in the air of earth; from the knees

to the calves he was in the earth; and from his calves to the soles of

his feet he was in the waters of the Abyss, so that he stood upon the

Abyss. And he turned to the East. The brightness of his countenance

dazzled me. At his mouth was a white cloud like a trumpet, which was

full of all sounds sounding quickly. When he blew in it, it sent forth

three winds, of which one sustained above itself a fiery cloud, and

one a storm-cloud, and one a cloud of light. But the wind with the

fiery cloud above it hovered before the Man’s face, while the two

others descended to his breast and blew there.

“And in the fiery cloud there was a living fiery multitude all one in

will and life. Before them was spread a tablet covered with quills

(_pennae_) which flew in the precepts of God. And when the precepts of

God lifted up that tablet where God’s knowledge had written certain of

its secrets, this multitude with one impulse gazed on it. And as they

saw the writing, God’s virtue was so bestowed upon them that as a

mighty trumpet they gave forth in one note a music manifold.

“The wind having the storm-cloud over it, spread, with that cloud,

from the south to the west. In it was a multitude of the blessed, who

possessed the spirit of life; and their voice was as the noise of many

waters as they cried: We have our habitations from Him who made this

wind, and when shall we receive them? But the multitude that was in

the fiery cloud chanted responding: When God shall grasp His trumpet,

lightning and thunder and burning fire shall He send upon the earth,

and then in that trumpet shall ye have your habitation.

“And the wind which had over it the cloud of light spread with that

cloud from the east to the north. But masses of darkness and thick

horror coming from the west, extended themselves to the light cloud,

yet could not pass beyond it. In that darkness was a countless crowd

of lost souls; and these swerved in their course whenever they heard

the song of those singing in the storm-cloud, as if they shunned their

company.

“Then I saw coming from the north, a cloud barren of delight,

untouched by the Sun’s rays. It reached towards the darkness

aforesaid, and was full of malignant spirits, who go about devising

snares for men. And I heard the old serpent saying, ‘I will prepare my

men of might and will make war upon mine enemies.’ And he spat forth

among men a spume of things impure, and inflated them with derision.

Then he blew up a foul mist which filled the whole earth as with black

smoke, out of which was heard a groaning; and in that mist I saw the

images of every sin.”[562]

These images now speak in their own defence, and are answered by the

virtues, speaking from the storm-cloud, Heavenly Love replying to Love of

this World, Discipline answering Petulance, Shame answering Ribaldry (the

vice of the _jongleours_) after the fashion of such mediaeval allegorical

debates. The virtues are simply voices; but the monstrous or bestial image

of each sin is described:

“Ignavia (cowardly sloth) had a human head, but its left ear was like

the ear of a hare, and so large as to cover the head. Its body and

limbs were worm-like, apparently without bones; and it spoke

trembling.”[563]

Hildegard explains the general features of her vision: God with secret

inquisition, reviewing the profound disposal of His will, made three ways

of righteousness, which should advance in the three orders of the blessed.

These are the three winds with the three clouds above them. The first wind

bears over it the fiery cloud, which is the glory of angels burning with

love of God, willing only what He wills; the wind bearing over it the

storm-cloud represents the works of men, stormy and various, done in

straits and tribulations; the third way of righteousness, through the

Incarnation of our Lord, bears above it a white and untouched virginity,

as a cloud of light.[564]

Then Hildegard sees the punishments of those who die in their sins

impenitent. They were in a pit having a bottom of burning pitch, out of

which crawled fiery worms; and sharp nails were driven about in that pit

as by a wind.

“I saw a well deep and broad, full of boiling pitch and sulphur, and

around it were wasps and scorpions, who scared but did not injure the

souls of those therein; which were the souls of those who had slain in

order not to be slain.

“Near a pond of clear water I saw a great fire. In this some souls

were burned and others were girdled with snakes, and others drew in

and again exhaled the fire like a breath, while malignant spirits cast

lighted stones at them. And all of them beheld their punishments

reflected in the water, and thereat were the more afflicted. These

were the souls of those who had extinguished the substance of the

human form within them, or had slain their infants.

“And I saw a great swamp, over which hung a black cloud of smoke,

which was issuing from it. And in the swamp there swarmed a mass of

little worms. Here were the souls of those who in the world had

delighted in foolish merriment (_inepta laetitia_).[565]

“And I saw a great fire, black, red, and white, and in it horrible

fiery vipers spitting flame; and there the vipers tortured the souls

of those who had been slaves of the sin of uncharitableness

(_acerbitas_).

“And I saw a fire burning in a blackness, in which were dragons, who

blew up the fire with their breath. And near was an icy river; and the

dragons passed into it from time to time and disturbed it. And a fiery

air was over both river and fire. Here were punished the souls of

liars; and for relief from the heat, they pass into the river, and

again, for the cold, they return to the fire, and the dragons torment

them. But the fiery air afflicts only those who have sworn

falsely.[566]

“I saw a hollow mountain full of fire and vipers, with a little

opening; and near it a horrible cold place crawling with scorpions.

The souls of those guilty of envy and malice suffer here, passing for

relief from one place of torment to the other.

“And I saw a thickest darkness, in which the souls of the disobedient

lay on a fiery pavement and were bitten by sharp-toothed worms. For

blind were they in life, and the fiery pavement is for their wilful

disobedience, and the worms because they disobeyed their prelates.

“And I beheld at great height in the air a hail of ice and fire

descending. And from that height, the souls of those who had broken

their vows of chastity were falling, and then as by a wind were

whirled aloft again wrapped in a ligature of darkness, so that they

could not move; and the hail of cold and fire fell upon them.

“And I saw demons with fiery scourges beating hither and thither,

through fires shaped like thorns and sharpened flails, the souls of

those who on earth had been guilty bestially.”[567]

After the vision of the punishment, Hildegard states the penance which

would have averted it, and usually follows with pious discourse and

quotations from Scripture. Apparently she would have the punishments seen

by her to be taken not as allegories, but literally as those actually in

store for the wicked.

It is different with her visions of Paradise. In Hildegard, as in Dante,

descriptions of heaven’s blessedness are pale in comparison with the

highly-coloured happenings in hell. And naturally, since Paradise is won

by those in whom spirit has triumphed over carnality. But flesh triumphed

in the wicked on earth, and hell is of the flesh, though the spirit also

be agonized. Hildegard sees many blessed folk in Paradise, but all is much

the same with them: they are clad in splendid clothes, they breathe an air

fragrant with sweetest flowers, they are adorned with jewels, and many of

them wear crowns. For example, she sees the blessed virgins standing in

purest light and limpid splendour, surpassing that of the sun. They are

clad “quasi candidissima veste velut auro intexta, et quasi pretiosissimis

lapidibus a pectore usque ad pedes, in modum dependentis zonae, ornata

induebantur, quae etiam maximum odorem velut aromatum de se emittebat. Sed

et cingulis, quasi auro et gemmis ac margaritis supra humanum intellectum

ornatis, circumcingebantur.”

This seems a description of heavenly millinery. Are these virgins rewarded

in the life to come with what they spurned in this? What would the saint

have thought of virgins had she seen them in the flesh clad in the whitest

vestment ornamented with interwoven gold and gems, falling in alluring

folds from their breasts to their feet, giving out aromatic odours, and

belted with girdles of pearls beyond human conception? Could it be

possible that the woman surviving in the nun took delight in contemplating

the blissful things forbidden here below? However this may be, the quasi-s

and velut-s suggest the symbolical character of these marvels. This

indication becomes stronger as Hildegard, in language wavering between the

literal and the symbolical, explains the appropriateness of ornaments and

perfumes as rewards for the virtues shown by saints on earth. At last all

is made clear: the _Lux vivens_ declares that these ornaments are

spiritual and eternal; gold and gems, which are of the dust, are not for

the eternal life of celestial beings; but the elect are spiritually

adorned by their righteous works as people are bodily adorned with costly

ornaments. So one gains the lesson that the bliss of heaven can only be

shown in allegories, since it surpasses the understanding of men while

held in mortal flesh.[568]

These visions from Hildegard’s _Book of the Rewards of Life_ may be

supplemented by one or two selected from the curious and lengthy work

which she named _Scivias_, signifying _Scito vias domini_ (know the ways

of the Lord). In this work, on which she laboured for nine years, the

seeress shows forth the Church, in images seen in visions, and the whole

dogmatic scheme of Christian polity. The allegories form the texts of

expository sermons. For example, the first vision in the first Book is of

an iron-coloured mountain, which is at once explained as an image of the

stability of God’s eternal kingdom. The third vision is of a fiery,

egg-shaped object, very complicated in construction, and devised to

illustrate the truth that things visible and temporal shadow forth the

invisible and eternal, in the polity of God.[569] In the fourth vision,

globes of fire are seen to enter the human form at birth, and are then

attacked by many whirlwinds rushing in upon them. This is an allegory of

human souls and their temptations, and forms the text for a long discourse

on the nature of the soul.

The fifth vision is of the Synagogue, the _Mater incarnationis Filii Dei_:

“Then I saw as it were the image of a woman, pale from the top to the

navel, and black from the navel to the feet, and its feet were

blood-colour, and had about them a very white cloud. This image lacked

eyes, and kept its hands under its arm-pits. It stood by the Altar

that is before the eyes of God, but did not touch it.”

The pale upper part of this image represents the prescience of the

patriarchs and prophets, who had not the strong light of the Gospel; the

black lower portion represents Israel’s later backslidings; and the bloody

feet surrounded by a white cloud, the slaying of Christ, and the Church

arising from that consummation. The image is sightless--blind to

Christ--and stands before His altar, but will have none of it; and its

slothful hands keep from the work of righteousness.[570]

The sixth vision is of the orders of celestial spirits, and harks back to

the _Celestial Hierarchy_ of Dionysius the Areopagite. In the height of

the celestial secrets Hildegard sees a shining company of supernal spirits

having as it were wings (_pennas_) across their breasts, and bearing

before them a face like the human countenance, in which the look of man

was mirrored. These are angels spreading as wings the desires of their

profound intelligence; not that they have wings, like birds; but they

quickly do the will of God in their desires, as a man flees quickly in his

thoughts.[571] They manifest the beauty of rationality through their

faces, wherein God scrutinizes the works of men. For these angels see to

the accomplishment of the will of God in men; and then in themselves they

show the actions of men.

Another celestial company was seen, also having as it were wings over

their breasts, and bearing before them a face like the human countenance

in which the image of the Son of Man shone as in a mirror. These are

archangels contemplating the will of God in the desires of their own

intelligences, and displaying the grace of rationality; they glorify the

incarnate Word by figuring in their attributes the mysteries of the

Incarnation. This vision, symbolizing the angelic intelligence, is

consciously and rationally constructed.

Perhaps the same may be said of the second vision of the second Book:[572]

“Then I saw a most glorious light and in it a human form of sapphire

hue, all aflame with a most gentle glowing fire; and that glorious

light was infused in the glowing fire, and the fire was infused in the

glorious light; and both light and fire transfused that human

form--all inter-existent as one light, one virtue, and one power.”

This vision of the Trinity, in which the glorious light is the Father, the

human form is the Son, and the fire is the Holy Spirit, may remind the

reader of the closing “vision” of the thirty-third canto of Dante’s

_Paradiso_.

The third Book contains manifold visions of a four-sided edifice set upon

a mountain, and built with a double (_biformis_) wall. Here an infinitude

of symbolic detail illustrates the entire Christian Faith. Observe a part

of the symbolism of the twofold wall: the wall is double (_in duabus

formis_). One of its formae[573] is speculative knowledge, which man

possesses through careful and penetrating investigation of the speculation

of his mind; so that he may be circumspect in all his ways. The other

forma of the wall represents the _homo operans_.

“This speculative knowledge shines in the brightness of the light of

day, that through it men may see and consider their acts. This

brightness is of the human mind carefully looking about itself; and

this glorious knowledge appears as a white mist permeating the minds

of the peoples, as quickly as mist is scattered through the air; it is

light as the light of day, after the brightness of that most glorious

work which God benignly works in men, to wit, that they shun evil and

do the good which shines in them as the light of day.... This

knowledge is speculative, for it is like a mirror (_speculum_) in

which a man sees whether his face be fair or blotched; thus this

knowledge views the good and evil in the deed done.”[574]

The _Scivias_ closes with visions of the Last Judgment, splendid, ordered,

tremendous, and rendered audible in hymns rising to the Virgin and to

Christ. Apostles, martyrs, saints chant the refrains of victory which echo

the past militancy of this faithful choir.

* * * * *

The visions of Elizabeth of Schönau and Hildegard of Bingen set forth

universal dogmas and convictions. They show the action of the imaginative

and rational faculties and the full use of the acquired knowledge

possessed by the women to whom they came. Such visions spring from the

mind--quite different are those born of love. Emotion dominates the

latter; their motives are subjective; they are personal experiences having

no clear pertinency to the lives of others. If the visions of Hildegard

were object lessons, the blissful ecstasies of Mary of Ognies and Liutgard

of Tongern were specifically their own, very nearly as the intimate

consolation of a wife from a husband, or a lady from her faithful knight,

would be that woman’s and none other’s.

One cannot say that there was no love of God before Jesus was born; still

less that men had not conceived of God as loving them. Nevertheless in

Jesus’ words God became lovable as never before, and God’s love of man was

shown anew, and was anew set forth as the perfect pattern of human love.

In Christ, God offered the sacrifice which afore He had demanded of

Abraham: for “God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son.”

That Son carried out the Father’s act: “Greater love hath no man than

this, that a man lay down his life for his friend.” So men learned the

final teaching: “God is love.”

A new love also was aroused by the personality of Jesus. Was this the love

of God or love of man? Rather, it was such as to reveal the two as one. In

Jesus’ teachings, love of God and love of man might not be severed: “As ye

have done it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it

unto me.” And the love which He inspired for himself was at once a love of

man and love of God.[575] Think of that love, new in the world, with

which, more than with her ointment or her tears, the woman who had been a

sinner bathed the Master’s feet.

This woman saw the Master in the flesh; but the love which was hers was

born again in those who never looked upon His face. Through the Middle

Ages the love of Christ with which saintly women were possessed was as

impulsive as this sinner’s, and also held much resembling human passion.

Their burning faith tended to liquefy to ecstatic experiences. They had

renounced the passionate love of man in order to devote themselves to the

love of Christ; and as their thoughts leapt toward the Bridegroom, the

Church’s Spouse and Lord, their visions sometimes kept at least the colour

of the love for knight or husband which they had abjured.[576]

At the height of the horrors of the Albigensian Crusade, in the year 1212,

Fulco, Bishop of Toulouse, was driven from his diocese by the incensed but

heretical populace. He travelled northward through France, seeking aid

against these foes of Christ, and came to the diocese of Liége. There he

observed with joy the faith and humility of those who were leading a

religious life, and was struck by the devotion of certain saintly women

whose ardour knew no bounds. It was all very different from Toulouse.

“Indeed I have heard you declare that you had gone out of Egypt--your own

diocese--and having passed through the desert, had reached the promised

land--in Liége.”

Jacques de Vitry is speaking. His friend the bishop had asked him to write

of these holy women, who brought such glory to the Church in troubled

times. Jacques was himself a clever Churchman, zealous for the Church’s

interests and his own. He afterwards became Bishop and Cardinal of

Tusculum; and as papal legate consecrated the holy bones of her whom the

Church had decided to canonize, the blessed Mary of Ognies, the paragon of

all these other women who rejoiced the ecclesiastical hearts of himself

and Fulco. Jacques had known her and had been present at her pious death;

and also had witnessed many of the matters of which he is speaking at the

commencement of his _Vita_ of this saint.[577]

Many of these women, continues Jacques, had for Christ spurned carnal

joys, and for Him had despised the riches of this world, in poverty and

humility clinging to their heavenly Spouse.

“You saw,” says Jacques, again addressing Fulco, “some of these women

dissolved with such a particular and marvellous love toward God (_tam

speciali et mirabili in Deum amoris affectione resolutas_) that they

languished with desire, and for years had rarely been able to rise

from their cots. They had no other infirmity, save that their souls

were melted with desire of Him, and, sweetly resting with the Lord, as

they were comforted in spirit they were weakened in body. They cried

in their hearts, though from modesty their lips dissimulated:

“Fulcite me floribus, stipate me malis, quia amore langueo.”[578] The

cheeks of one were seen to waste away, while her soul was melted with

the greatness of her love. Another’s flow of tears had made visible

furrows down her face. Others were drawn with such intoxication of

spirit that in sacred silence they would remain quiet a whole day,

‘while the King was on His couch’ (_i.e._ at meat),[579] with no sense

or feeling for things without them, so that they could not be roused

by clamour or feel a blow. I saw another whom for thirty years her

Spouse had so zealously guarded in her cell, that she could not leave

it herself, nor could the hands of others drag her out. I saw another

who sometimes was seized with ecstasy five-and-twenty times a day, in

which state she was motionless, and on returning to herself was so

enraptured that she could not keep from displaying her inner joy with

movements of the body, like David leaping before the Ark. And I saw

still another who after she had lain for some time dead, before burial

was permitted by the Lord to return to the flesh, that she might on

earth do purgatorial penance; and long was she thus afflicted of the

Lord, sometimes rolling herself in the fire, and in the winter

standing in frozen water.”[580]

But what need to say more of these, as all their graces are found in one

precious and pre-excellent pearl--and Jacques proceeds to tell the life of

Mary of Ognies. She was born in a village near Namur in Belgium, about the

year 1177. She never took part in games or foolishness with other girls;

but kept her soul free from vanity. Married at fourteen to a young man,

she burned the more to afflict her body, passing the nights in austerities

and prayer. Her husband soon was willing to dwell with her in continence,

himself sustaining her in her holy life, and giving his goods to the poor

for Christ’s sake.

There was nothing more marvellous with Mary than her gift of tears, as

her soul dwelt in the passion of her Lord. Her tears--so says her

biographer--wetted the pavement of the Church or the cloth of the altar.

Her life was one of body-destroying austerities: she went barefoot in the

ice of the winter; often she took no food through the day, and then

watched out the night in prayer. Her body was afflicted and wasted; her

soul was comforted. She had frequent visions, the gift of second sight,

and great power over devils. Once for thirty-five days in silent trance

she rested sweetly with the Lord, only occasionally uttering these words:

“I desire the body of our Lord Jesus Christ” (_i.e._ the Eucharist); and

when she had received it, she turned again to silence.[581] Always she

sought after her Lord: He was her meditation, and example in speech and

deed. She died in the year 1213, at the age of thirty-six. She was called

Mary of Ognies, from the name of the town where a church was dedicated to

her, and where her relics were laid to rest.

* * * * *

Emotionally, another very interesting personality was the blessed virgin,

Liutgard of Tongern, a younger contemporary of Mary of Ognies. In

accordance with her heart’s desire, she was providentially protected from

the forceful importunities of her wooers, and became a Benedictine nun.

After some years, however, seeking a more strenuous rule of life, she

entered the Cistercian convent at Aquiria, near Cambray.[582]

Liutgard’s experiences were sense-realizations of her faith, but chiefly

of her love of Christ. Sometimes her senses realized the imagery of the

Apocalypse; as when singing in Church she had a vision of Christ as a

white lamb. The lamb rests a foot on each of her shoulders, sets his mouth

to hers, and draws out sweetest song. Far more frequently she realized

within her heart the burning words of Canticles. Her whole being yearned

continually for the Lord, and sought no other comfort. For five years she

received almost daily visits from the Mother of Christ, as well as from

the Apostles and other saints; the angels were continually with her. Yet

in all these she did not find perfect rest for her spirit, till she found

the Saint of saints, who is ineffably sweeter than them all, even as He is

their sanctifier. Smitten as the bride in Canticles, she is wounded, she

languishes, she pants, she arises; “in the streets” she seeks the Saints

of the New Dispensation, and through “the broad places” the Patriarchs of

the Old Testament. Little by little she passes by them “because He is not

far from every one of us”; she finds Him whom her soul cherishes. She

finds, she holds Him, because He does not send her away; she holds Him by

faith, happy in the seeking, more happy in the holding fast.[583]

There are three couches in Canticles:[584] the first signifies the soul’s

state of penitence; the second its state of warfare; the third the state

of those made perfect in the _vita contemplativa_. On the first couch the

soul is wounded, on the second it is wearied, on the third it is made

glad. The saintly Liutgard sought her Beloved perfectly on the couch of

penitence, and watered it with her tears, although she never had been

stung by mortal sin. On the second couch she sought her Beloved, battling

against the flesh with fasting and endeavour; with poverty and humility

she overcame the world, and cast down the devil with prayer and remedial

tears. On the third couch, which is the couch of quiet, she perfectly

sought her Beloved, since she did not lean upon the angels or saints, but

through contemplation rested sweetly only upon the couch of the Spouse.

This couch is called flowery (_floridus_) from the vernal quality of its

virtues; and it is called “ours” because common to husband and wife: in it

she may say, “My Beloved is mine and I am His,” and, “I am my Beloved’s,

and His desire is towards me.” Why not say that? exclaims the biographer,

quoting the lines:

“Nescit amor Dominum; non novit amor dominari,

Quamlibet altus amet, non amat absque pari.”

Thenceforth her spirit was absorbed in God, as drops of water in a jar of

wine. When asked how she was wont to see the visage of Christ in

contemplation, she answered: “In a moment there appears to me a splendour

inconceivable, and as lightning I see the ineffable beauty of His

glorification; the sight of which I could not endure in this present life,

did it not instantly pass from my view. A mental splendour remains, and

when I seek in that what I saw for an instant, I do not find it.”

A little more than a year before her death the Lord Jesus Christ appeared

to her, with the look as of one who applauds, and said: “The end of thy

labour is at hand: I do not wish thee longer to be separated from me. This

year I require three things of thee: first, that thou shouldst render

thanks for all thy benefits received; secondly, that thou pour thyself out

in prayer to the Father for my sinners; and thirdly, that, without any

other solicitude, thou burn to come to me, panting with desire.”[585]

The religious yearning which with Liutgard touches sense-realization,

seems transformed completely into the latter in the extraordinary German

book of one Sister Mechthild, called of Magdeburg.[586] The authoress

probably was born not far from that town about the year 1212. To judge

from her work, she belonged to a good family and was acquainted with the

courtly literature of the time. She speaks of her loving parents, from

whom she tore herself away at the age of twenty-three, and entered the

town of Magdeburg, there to begin a life of rapt religious mendicancy, for

which Francis had set the resistless example. Sustained by love for her

Lord, she led a despised and homeless life of hardship and austerity for

thirty years. At length bodily infirmities brought her to rest in a

Cistercian cloister for nuns at Helfta, near Eisleben, where ruled a wise

and holy abbess, the noble Gertrude of Hackeborn. Here Mechthild remained

until her death in 1277. For many years it had been her custom to write

down her experiences of the divine love in a book which she called _The

Flowing Light of God_, in which she also wrote the prophetic

denunciations, revealed to her to be pronounced before men, especially in

the presence of those who were great in what should be God’s holy

Church.[587]

“Frau Minne (Lady Love) you have taken from me the world’s riches and

honour,” cries Mechthild.[588] Love’s ecstasy came upon her when she

abandoned the world and cast herself upon God alone. Then first her soul’s

eyes beheld the beautiful manhood of her Lord Jesus Christ, also the Holy

Trinity, her own guardian angel, and the devil who tempted her through the

vainglory of her visions and through unchaste desire. She defended herself

with the agony of our Lord. For Mechthild, hell is the “city whose name is

eternal hate.” With her all blessedness is love, as her book will now

disclose.

Cries the Soul to Love (_Minne_) her guardian: “Thou hast hunted and

taken, bound and wounded me; never shall I be healed.”

Love answers: “It was my pleasure to hunt thee; to take thee captive was

my desire; to bind thee was my joy. I drove Almighty God from His throne

in heaven, and took His human life from Him, and then with honour gave

Him back to His Father; how couldst thou, poor worm, save thyself from

me!”[589]

What then will love’s omnipotence exact from this poor Soul? Merely all.

Drawn by yearning, the Soul comes flying, like an eagle toward the sun.

“See, how she mounts to us, she who wounded me”--it is the Lord that is

speaking. “She has thrown away the ashes of the world, overcome lust, and

trodden the lion of pride beneath her feet--thou eager huntress of love,

what bringest thou to me?”

“Lord, I bring thee my treasure, which is greater than mountains, wider

than the world, deeper than the sea, higher than the clouds, more

beautiful than the sun, more manifold than the stars, and outweighs the

riches of the earth.”

“Image of my Divinity, ennobled by my manhood, adorned by my Holy Spirit,

how is thy treasure called?”

“Lord, it is called my heart’s desire: I have withdrawn it from the world,

withheld it from myself, forbidden it all creatures. I can carry it no

farther; Lord, where shall I lay it?”

“Thou shalt lay thy heart’s desire nowhere else than in my divine heart

and on my human breast. There only wilt thou be comforted and kissed with

my spirit.”

Love casts out fear and difference, and lifts the Soul to equality with

the divine Lover. Through the passion of love the Soul may pass into the

Beloved’s being, and become one with Him: “He, thy life, died from love

for thy sake; now love Him so that thou mayest long to die for His sake.

Then shalt thou burn for evermore unquenched, like a shining spark in the

great fire of the Living Majesty.”

These are passion’s vision-flights. But God himself points out the way by

which the Soul that loves shall come to Him: she--the Soul--shall come,

surmounting the need of penitence and penance, surmounting love of the

world, conflicts with the devil, carnal appetite, and the promptings of

her own will. Thereupon, exhausted, she shall yearn resistlessly for that

beautiful Youth (Christ). He will be moved to come to meet her. Now her

guardians (the Senses) bid her attire herself. “Love, whither shall I

hence?” she cries. The Senses make answer: “We hear the murmur; the Prince

will come to meet you in the dew and the sweet-bird song. Courage, Lady,

He will not tarry.”

The Soul clothes herself in a garment of humility, and over it draws the

white robe of chastity, and goes into the wood. There nightingales sing of

union with God, and strains of divine knowledge meet her ears. She then

strives to follow in festal dance (_i.e._ to imitate) the example of the

prophets, the chaste humility of the Virgin, the virtues of Jesus, and the

piety of His saints. Then comes the Youth and says: “Maiden, thou hast

danced holily, even as my saints.”

The Soul answers: “I cannot dance unless thou leadest. If thou wouldst

have me spring aloft, sing thou: and I will spring--into love, and from

love to knowledge, and from knowledge to ecstasy, above all human sense.”

The Youth speaks: “Maiden, thy dance of praise is well performed. Since

now thou art tired, thou shalt have thy will with the Virgin’s Son. Come

to the brown shades at midday, to the couch of love, and there shalt thou

cool thyself with Him.”

Then the Soul speaks to her guardians, the Senses: “I am tired with the

dance; leave me, for I must go where I may cool myself.” The Senses bid

her cool herself in the tears of love shed by St. Mary Magdalen.

“Hush, good sirs: ye know not what I mean. Unhindered, for a little I

would drink the unmixed wine.”

“Lady, in the Virgin’s chastity the great love is reached.”

“That may be--with me it is not the highest.”

“You, Lady, might cool yourself in martyr-blood.”

“I have been martyred many a day.”

“In the counsel of Father Confessors, the pure live gladly.”

“Good is their counsel, but it helps not here.”

“Great safety would you find in the Apostles’ wisdom.”

“Wisdom I have myself--to choose the best.”

“Lady, bright are the angels, and lovely in love’s hue; to cool yourself,

be lifted up with them.”

“The bliss of angels brings me love’s woe, unless I see their lord, my

Bridegroom.”

“Then cool you in the hard, holy life that John the Baptist showed.”

“I have tried that painful toil; my love passes beyond that.”

“Lady, would you with love cool yourself, approach the Child in the

Virgin’s lap.”

“That is a childish love, to quiet children with. I am a full-grown bride

and will have my Bridegroom.”

“Lady, there we should be smitten blind. The Godhead is so fiery hot.

Heaven’s glow and all the holy lights flow from His divine breath and

human mouth by the counsel of the Holy Spirit.”

But the Soul feeling its nature and its affinity with God, through love,

makes answer boldly: “The fish cannot drown in the water, nor the bird

sink in the air, nor gold perish in the flame, where it gains its bright

clarity and colour. God has granted to all creatures to follow their

natures; how can I withstand mine? To God will I go, who is my Father by

nature, my Brother through His humility, my Bridegroom through love, and I

am His forever.”[590] Not long after this the Soul’s rapture bursts forth

in song:

“Ich sturbe gern von minnen, moehte es mir geschehen,

Denn jenen den ich minnen, den han ich gesehen

Mit minen liehten ougen in miner sele stehen.”[591]

Mechthild’s book is heavy with passion--with God’s passionate love for the

Soul, and the Soul’s passionate response. No speech between lovers could

outdo the converse between them. God calls the Soul, sweet dove, dear

heart, my queen; and with like phrase the quivering Soul responds upward,

as it were, to the great countenance glowing above it. Throughout, there

is passion and impatient yearning--or satisfaction. The pain of the Soul

severed, not yet a bride, is deeper than the abyss, bitterer than the

world; but her joy shall exceed that of seraphs, she, Bride of the

Trinity.[592]

The Soul must surrender herself, and become sheer desire for God.[593]

God’s own yearning has begotten this desire. As glorious prince, as

knight, as emperor, God comes; also in other forms:

“I come to my Beloved

As dew upon the flowers.”[594]

For each other are these lovers wounded, for each other these lovers

bleed, and each to the other is joy unspeakable and unforgettable. From

the wafer of the holy Eucharist, the Lamb looks out upon me “with such

sweet eyes that I never can forget.”

“His eyes in my eyes; His heart in my heart,

His soul in my soul,

Embraced and untroubled.”[595]

No need to say that in the end love draws the Soul to heaven’s gate, which

the Lord opens to her. All is marvellous; but, far more, all is love: the

Lord kisses her--what else than love can the soul thereafter know or

feel.[596]

Mechthild, of course, is what is called a “mystic,” and a forerunner

indeed of many another--Eckhart, Suso, Tauler--of German blood. With

direct and utter passion she realizes God’s love; also she feels and

thinks in symbols, which, with her, never cease to be the things they

literally are. They remain flesh and blood, while also signifying the

mysteries of God. Jesus was a man, Mechthild a woman. Her love not only

uses lovers’ speech, but actually holds affinity with a maid’s love for

her betrothed. If it is the Soul’s love of God, it is also the woman’s

love of Him who overhung her from the Cross.

CHAPTER XX

THE SPOTTED ACTUALITY

THE TESTIMONY OF INVECTIVE AND SATIRE; ARCHBISHOP RIGAUD’S _REGISTER_;

ENGELBERT OF COLOGNE; POPULAR CREDENCES

The preceding sketches of monastic qualities and personalities illustrate

the ideals of monasticism. That monastic practices should fall away,

corruptions enter, and when expelled inevitably return, was to be

expected. The cause lay in those qualities of human nature which may be

either power or frailty. The acquisitive, self-seeking, lusting qualities

of men lie at the base of life, and may be essential to achievement and

advance. Yet a higher interpretation of values will set the spiritual

above the earthly, and beatify the self-denial through which man

ultimately attains his highest self, under the prompting of his vision of

the divine. The sight of this far goal is given to few men steadily, and

the multitude, whether cowled or clad in fashions of the world, pursue

more immediate desires.

So human nature saw to it that monasticism should constantly exhibit

frivolity instead of earnestness, gluttony instead of fasting, avarice

instead of alms-giving, anger and malice instead of charity and love,

lustfulness instead of chastity, and, instead of meekness, pride and

vain-glory. The particular forms assumed by these corruptions depended on

the conditions of mediaeval life and the position in it occupied by monks.

It has already been said that the standard of conduct for the secular

clergy was the same in principle as that for monks, though with allowance

made for the stress of a life of service in the cure of souls.[597] But

always the cloister and the hermitage were looked upon as the

abiding-places where one stood the best chance to save one’s soul: the

life of the layman--merchant, usurer, knight--was fraught with instant

peril; that of the secular clergy was also perilous, especially when they

held high office. Dread of ecclesiastical preferment might be well

founded; the reluctance to be a bishop was often real. This sentiment,

like all feelings in the Middle Ages, took the form of a story, with the

usual vision to certify the moral of the tale:

“It is told of a certain prior of Clairvaux, Geoffrey by name, that

when he had been elected Bishop of Tournai, and Pope Eugene as well as

the blessed Bernard, his own abbot, was urging him to take the office,

he cast himself down at the feet of the blessed Bernard and his

clergy, and lay prone in the form of a cross, and said: ‘An expelled

monk I may be, if you drive me out; but I will never be a bishop.’ At

a later time, as this same prior lay breathing his last, a monk who

loved him well adjured him in the name of God to bring him news of his

state beyond the grave, if God would permit it. Some time after, as

the monk was praying prostrate before the altar, his friend appeared

and said that it was he. When the monk asked him how he was faring,

‘Well,’ he replied, ‘by the grace of God. Yet verily it has been

revealed to me by the blessed Trinity, that had I been in the number

of bishops I should have been in the number of the reprobate and

damned.’”[598]

Through the Middle Ages, Church dignities everywhere were secularized

through the vast possessions, and corresponding responsibilities,

attaching to them. The clerical situation varied in different lands, yet

with a like result. The Italian clergy were secularized through

participation in civic and papal business, the German through their

estates and principalities. In France clerical secularization was most

typically mediaeval, because there the functions and fortunes of the

higher clergy were most inextricably involved in feudalism. Monasteries

and bishoprics were as feudal fiefs: abbots as well as bishops commonly

held lands from an over-lord, and were themselves lords of their

sub-vassals who held lands from them. To the former they owed rent, or

aid, or service; to the latter they owed protection. In either case they

might have to go or send their men to war. They also managed and guarded

their own lands, like feudal nobles, _vi et armis_. When the estates of a

monastery, for example, lay in different places, the abbot might exercise

authority over them through a local potentate, and might also have such a

protector (_vîdame_, _avoué_, _advocatus_) for the home abbey. There was

always a general feeling, often embodied in law or custom, that a Church

dignitary should fight by another’s sword and spear. But this did not

prevent bishop and abbot in countless instances in France, England,

Germany, and Spain, from riding mail-clad under their seignorial banner at

the head of their forces.[599]

Episcopal lands and offices were not inherited:[600] yet with rare

exceptions the bishops came from the noble, fighting, hunting class. They

were noblemen first and ecclesiastics afterwards. The same was true of the

abbots. Noble-born, they became dignitaries of the world through

investiture with the broad lands of the monastery, and then administrators

by reason of the temporal functions involved. As with the episcopal or

monastic heads, so with canons and monks. They, too, for the most part

were well-born. They also were good, bad, or indifferent, warlike or

clerkly, devoted to study, abandoned to pleasure, or following the one and

the other sparingly. Many a holy meditative monk there was; and many a

saintly parish priest, the stay of piety and justice in his village. The

rude times, the ceaseless murder and harrying, uncertainty and danger

everywhere, seemed to beget such holy lives.

Invectives, satires, histories, and records, bear witness to the state of

the clergy. All diatribes are to be taken with allowance. Whoever, for

example, reads Peter Damiani’s _Liber Gomorrhianus_ against the foulness

of the clergy, must bear in mind the writer’s fiercely ascetic temper, the

warfare which the stricter element in the Church was then waging against

simony and priestly concubinage, and the monkish phraseology so common to

ecclesiastical indictment of frivolity and vice.

One cannot quote comfortably from the _Gomorrhianus_. St. Bernard

furnishes more decorous denunciation:

“Woe unto this generation, for its leaven of the Pharisees which is

hypocrisy!--if that should be called hypocrisy which cannot be hidden

because of its abundance, and through impudence does not seek to hide!

To-day, foul rottenness crawls through the whole body of the Church.

If a heretic foe should arise openly, he would be cast out and

withered; or if the enemy raged madly, the Church might hide herself

from him. But now whom shall she cast out, or from whom hide herself?

All are friends and all are foes; all necessary and all adverse; all

of her own household and none pacific; all are her neighbours and all

seek their own interest. Ministers of Christ, they serve Antichrist.

They go clothed in the good things of the Lord and render Him no

honour. Hence that _éclat_ of the courtesan which you daily see, that

theatric garb, that regal state. Hence the gold-trapped reins and

saddles and spurs--for the spurs shine brighter than the altars. Hence

the splendid tables laden with food and goblets; hence the feastings

and drunkenness, the guitars, the lyres and the flutes; hence the

swollen wine-presses and the storehouses heaped and running over from

this one into that, and the jars of perfumes, and the stuffed purses.

’Tis for such matters that they wish to be and are the over-seers of

churches, deacons, archdeacons, bishops, and archbishops. For neither

do these offices come by merit, but through that sort of business

which walketh in darkness!”[601]

Such rhetoric gives glimpses of the times, but also springs from that

temper which is always crying _hora novissima, tempora pessima_.

Invectives of this nature have their deepest source in the religious

sense of the ineradicable opposition between this world and the kingdom of

heaven. Yet luxury did in fact pervade the Church of Bernard’s time, and

simony was as wide as western Europe. This crime was the offspring of the

entire social state; it was part and parcel of the feudal system and the

whole matter of lay investitures. One sees that simony was no extraneous

stain to be washed off from the body ecclesiastic, but rather an element

of its actual constitution. The eradication had to come through social and

ecclesiastical evolution, rather than spasmodic reformation.

One may turn from the invectives of the great saint to forms of satire

more frankly literary. The Latin poems “commonly attributed to Walter

Mapes”[602] satirize with biting ridicule, through the mouth of “Bishop

Golias,” the avarice and venality, the gluttony and lubricity of the

Church, secular and monastic. In a quite different kind of poem the satire

directs itself against the rapacity of Rome. She, head of the Church and

Caput Mundi, is shown to be like Scylla and Charybdis and the Sirens.[603]

These powerful verses anticipate the denunciation of the Roman papacy by

the good Germans Walther von der Vogelweide and Freidank,[604] and, a

century later, in the _Vision of Piers Ploughman_.

In this outcry against papal rapacity France was not silent. Most extreme

is the “Bible” of Guiot de Provens: it satirizes the entire age, “siècle

puant et orrible.” As it turns toward the papacy it cries:

“Ha! Rome, Rome,

Encor ociras tu maint home!”

The cardinals are stuffed with avarice and simony and evil living; without

faith or religion, they sell God and His Mother, and betray us and their

fathers. Rome sucks and devours us; Rome kills and destroys all. Guiot’s

voice is raised against the entire Church; neither the monks nor the

seculars escape--bishops, priests, canons, the black monks and the white,

Templars and Hospitallers, nuns and abbesses, all bad.[605]

One might extend indefinitely the list of these invectives, which, like

the corruptions denounced by them, were common to all mediaeval centuries.

From the testimony of more definite accounts one perceives the rudeness

and cruelty of mediaeval life, in which the Church likewise was involved.

In order to rise, it had to lift the social fabric. To this end many of

its children struggled nobly, devoting themselves and sometimes yielding

up their lives for the betterment of the society in which their lots were

cast.

One of these capable children of the Church who did his duty in the high

ecclesiastical station to which he was called was Eude Rigaud, or Odo

Rigaldus, Archbishop of Rouen from 1248 to 1275, the year of his death. He

was a scion of a noble house whose fiefs lay in the neighbourhood of

Brie-Comte-Robert (Seine-et-Marne). In 1236 he joined the Franciscans, and

then studied at Paris under Alexander of Hales, one of the Order’s great

theologians. His first fame came from his preaching. As archbishop, he was

a reformer, and abetted the endeavours of Pope Gregory IX. He was also a

counsellor of Saint Louis, and followed him upon that last crusade from

which the king did not return alive.[606]

The good archbishop was a man of method, and kept a record of his official

acts. This monumental document exists, the _Register_ of Rigaud’s

visitations among the monks and secular clergy within his wide

jurisdiction, between the years 1248 and 1269.[607] Consisting of entries

made at the time, it is a mirror of actual conditions, presumably similar

to those existing in other parts of France. Rigaud visited many

monasteries and parishes where he found nothing to reform, and merely made

a memorandum of having been there; wherever abuses were found, the entry

expands to a statement of them and the measures taken for their remedy.

Consequently one may not infer that the blameworthy or abominable

conditions recorded in the particular instance obtained universally in

Normandy. Occasionally Rigaud records in more detail the good condition of

some monastery. A few instructive extracts may be given.

“Calends of October (1248). We were again at Ouville (Ovilla). We

found that the prior wanders about when he ought to stay in the

cloister; he is not in the cloister one day in five. Item, he is a

drunkard, and of such vile drunkenness that he sometimes lies out in

the fields because of it. Item, he frequents feasts and drinking-bouts

with laymen. Item, he is incontinent, and is accused in respect to a

certain woman of Grainville, and also with the wife of Robertot, and

also with a woman of Rouen named Agnes. Item, brother Geoffrey was

publicly accused with respect to the wife of Walter of Esquaquelon who

recently had a child from him. Item, they do not keep proper accounts

of their revenues. We ordered that they should keep better

accounts.”[608]

Such an entry needs no comment. But it is illuminating to observe the

strictness or leniency with which Rigaud treats offences. Doubtless he was

guided by what he thought he could enforce.

Apparently near the Ouville priory, the archbishop was scandalized by the

priest of St. Vedasti de Depedale, who was convicted of taking part in the

rough ball-play, common in Normandy, in which game, as might easily

happen, he had injured some one. “He took oath before us that if again

convicted he would hold himself to have resigned from his church.”[609]

Rigaud did not approve of these somewhat too merry games for his parish

priests, who were not angels. The archbishop finds of the priest of

Lortiey “that he but rarely wears his capa, that he does not confess to

the _penitentiarius_, that he is gravely accused concerning two women, by

whom he has had many children, and he is drunken.”[610]

Rigaud enters the cases of other parish priests as follows:

“We found that the priest of Nigella was accused as to a woman, and of

being engaged in trade and of treating his father despitefully, who is

patron of the church which he holds, and that with drawn sword he

fought with a certain knight, with a riotous following of relatives

and friends. Item, the priest of Basinval is accused as to a woman

whom he takes about with him to the market-places and taverns.

Likewise the priest of Vieux-Rouen is accused of incontinency, and

goes about wearing a sword in shameless garb. Likewise the priest of

Cotigines is a dicer and plays at quoits and frequents taverns, and is

incontinent, and although corrected as to these matters,

perseveres.”[611]

Sometimes accusations were brought to the archbishop by the suffering

parishioners:

“Calends of August (1255). Passing through the village of Brai, the

parishioners of the church there accused the rector of the church in

our presence. They said that he went about in the night through the

village with arms, that he was quarrelsome and scurrilous and abusive

to his parishioners, and was incontinent.”

Summoning this priest before his ecclesiastical tribunal, the archbishop

says, “We admonished him to abstain from such ill-conduct; or that

otherwise we should proceed against him.”[612]

Either this priest or another of “Brayo subtus Baudemont,” named Walter,

was subsequently deprived of his priesthood on his own confession as

follows:

“He confessed that the accusation against him concerning a woman of

his parish, which he had denied under oath, was supported by truth;

item, he confessed in regard to a waxen image made to be used in

divining; he confessed (various other incontinencies and his

fatherhood of various children); item, he confessed his ill-repute for

usury and base gain; he admitted that he had led the dances at the

nuptials of a certain prostitute whom he had married.”[613]

Rigaud continually records accusations against parish priests, commonly

for incontinency and drunkenness and generally unbecoming conduct, and

sometimes for homicide.[614] But his own examinations kept out many a

turbulent and ignorant clerk, presented by the lay patron for the

benefice; and so he prevented improper inductions as he might. The

_Register_ gives a number of instances of crass illiteracy in these

candidates, a matter to cause no surprise, for the feudal patrons of the

living naturally presented their relatives. Some of these candidates

appealed to Rome from the archbishop’s refusal, probably without

success.[615]

A monk might be as bad as any parish priest:

“Brother Thomas ... wore gold rings. He went about in armour, by

night, and without any monastic habit, and kept bad company. He

wounded many clergy and laity at night, and was himself wounded,

losing a thumb. We commanded the abbot to expel him; or that otherwise

we should seize the place and expel the monks.”[616]

Life in a nunnery was the feminine counterpart of life in a monastery.

There were good and bad nunneries, and nuns good and bad, serious and

frivolous. Many had the foibles, and were addicted to the diversions,

comforts, or fancies of their sex: they were always wanting to keep dogs

and birds, and have locks to their chests!

“Nones of May (1250). We visited the Benedictine convent of nuns of

St. Sauveur at Evreux. There were sixty-one nuns there. Sometimes they

drank, not in the refectory or infirmary, but in their chambers. They

kept little dogs, squirrels, and birds. We ordered that all such

things be removed. They do not observe the _regula_. They eat flesh

needlessly. They have locked chests. We directed the abbess to inspect

their chests often and unexpectedly, or to take off the locks. We

directed the abbess to take away their girdles ornamented with

ironwork and their fancy pouches, and the silk cushions they were

working.”[617]

Again, the picture is more terrible:

“Nones of July (1249). We visited the priory of Villa Arcelli.

Thirty-three nuns are there and three lay sisters. They confess and

communicate six times a year. Only four of the nuns have taken the

vows according to the _regula_. Many of them had cloaks of rabbit-fur,

or made from the fur of hares and foxes. In the infirmary they eat

flesh needlessly. Silence is not observed; nor do they keep within the

cloister. Johanna of Aululari once went out and lived with some one,

by whom she had a child; and sometimes she goes out to see that child:

she is also suspected with a certain man named Gaillard. Isabella la

Treiche (?) is a fault-finder, murmuring against the prioress and

others. The stewardess is suspected with a man named Philip de

Vilarceau. The prioress is too remiss; she does not reprove. Johanna

de Alto Villari kept going out alone with a man named Gayllard, and

within a year had a child by him. The subprioress is suspected with

Thomas the carter; Idonia, her sister, with Crispinatus; and the Prior

of Gisorcium is always coming to the house for Idonia. Philippa of

Rouen is suspected with a priest of Suentre, of the diocese of

Chartres; Marguarita, the treasuress, with Richard de Genville, a

clerk. Agnes de Fontenei, with a priest of Guerrevile, diocese of

Chartres. The Tooliere (?) with Sir Andrew de Monciac, a knight. All

wear their hair improperly and perfume their veils. Jacqueline came

back pregnant from visiting a certain chaplain, who was expelled from

his house on account of this. Agnes de Monsec was suspected with the

same. Emengarde and Johanna of Alto Villari beat each other. The

prioress is drunk almost any night; she does not rise for matins, nor

eat in the refectory or correct excesses.”

The archbishop thereupon issues an order, regulating this extraordinary

convent, and prescribing a better way of living. He threatens to lay a

heavier hand on them if they do not obey.[618] This was what a loosely

regulated nunnery might come to. We close with the sketch of a good

monastery which had an evil abbot:

“Nones of August (1258). Through God’s grace we visited the monastery

of Jumiéges. Forty-three monks were there, and twenty-one outside. All

of these who dwelt there, except eleven, were priests (_sacerdotes_).

We found, by God’s grace, the convent well-ordered in its services and

observances, yet greatly troubled by what was said of the abbot within

and without its walls. For opinion was sinister regarding him, and

there, in full chapter, brother Peter of Neubourg, a monk of the

monastery, leaping up, made shameful charges against him. And he read

the following schedule: I, brother Peter of Neubourg, a monk of

Jumiéges, in my name and in the name of the monastery and for the

benefit of the monastery, bring before you, Reverend Father,

Archbishop of Rouen, for an accusation against Richard, Abbot of

Jumiéges, that he is a forger (_falsarius_) because he wrote or caused

to be written certain letters in the name of our convent, falsely

alleging our approval of them although we were absent and ignorant;

and secretly by night he sealed them with the convent’s seal....”

The letters related to an important controversy in which the monastery was

involved. Monk Peter offers to prove his case. A day is set for the

hearing. But, instead, the very next day, in order to avoid scandal, the

archbishop called the abbot before him and his counsellors; and

“We admonished him specially regarding the following matters: To wit:

that he should not keep dogs and birds of chase; that he should send

strolling players away from his premises; that he should abstain from

extravagant expenses; that he should not eat in his own chambers; that

he should keep from consorting with women altogether; that he should

order his household decently; that he should lease out the farms as

well as might be; that he should not burden the monks unduly; that he

should be more in the convent with them, and bear himself more

soberly. He made promises as to all these matters and took oath upon

holy relics that if he failed to obey our admonition he should be held

to do whatever we should decree in the premises.”[619]

Rigaud seems to have been lenient here, but may have known the wisest

course to take.

A peaceful death terminated Rigaud’s long career. We may leave his diocese

of Rouen, and travel north-easterly to the German archiepiscopal dukedom

of Cologne for a very different example of a brave prelate who brought

death upon himself.

The man who was chosen Archbishop of Cologne in 1216 was of the highest

birth. It was Engelbert, son of Count Engelbert of Berg. A young nobleman,

related by blood to the local powers, lay and ecclesiastic, and destined

for Church dignities, would be quickly given benefices. Engelbert received

such, and also was appointed Provost of the Cathedral. Strong of body,

rich, he led a boisterous martial life, and took a truculent part in the

political dissensions which were undoing the German realm. With his

cousin, the Archbishop Adolph, he went over to the side of Philip of

Suavia. For this the archbishop and his provost were deposed and

excommunicated by Pope Innocent III. There ensued years of turbulence and

fighting, during which Engelbert’s hand followed his passions. But with

the turning of events in 1208 he was reconciled to the Pope, restored to

his offices, and went crusading against the Albigenses in atonement for

his sins. He stood by the young Frederick, then favoured by Innocent, and

after some intervening years of proof, was, with general approval, elected

Archbishop of Cologne. He was about thirty-one years old.

There had been power and bravery in the man from the beginning; and his

faculties gained poise and gathered purpose through the stormy springtime

of his life. Now he stood forth prince-bishop, feudal duke; a man strong

of arm and clear of vision, steadfast against the violence of his brother

nobles who oppressed the churches and cloisters within their lordships.

The weak found him a rock of defence. Says his biographer, Caesar of

Heisterbach:

“He was a defender of the afflicted and a hammer of tyrants,

magnanimous and meek, lofty and affable, stern and gentle, dissembling

for a time, and when least expected girding himself for vengeance.

With the bishopric he had received the spiritual sword, and the

material sword with the dukedom. He used either weapon against the

rebellious, excommunicating some and crushing some by war.”

Under him archbishopric and dukedom prospered, their well-managed revenues

increased, palaces and churches rose. No mightier prince of the Church, no

stronger, juster ruler could be found. Said Pope Honorius after

Engelbert’s death: “All men in Germany feared me from fear of him.” From

the lay and German side is heard the hearty voice of Walther von der

Vogelweide, no friend of priests! “Worthy Bishop of Cologne, happy should

you be! You have well served the realm, and served it so that your praise

rises and waves on high. Master of princes! if your might weighs hard on

evil cowards, deem that as nothing! King’s guardian, high is your state,

unequalled Chancellor!”[620]

Archbishop of Cologne, duke of its double dukedom, and Regent of the

German realm, Engelbert was well-nigh Germany’s greatest figure during

these years. If his arm was strong, his also was the spirit of counsel and

wisdom. And although bearing himself as prince and ruler, he had within

him the devotion and humility of a true bishop. Said one of Engelbert’s

chaplains, speaking to the Abbot of Heisterbach: “Although my lord seems

as of the world, within he is not as he appears outwardly. Know that he

has many secret comfortings from God.”

The iron course of Engelbert’s life brought queryings to the monkish mind

of his biographer. Caesar felt that it was not easy for any bishop to be

saved; how much harder was it for a statesman-warrior-prelate so to

conduct himself in the warfare of this world as to attain at last “the

peace of divine contemplation.” Not thither did such a career seem to

lead! But there was a way, or at least an exit, which surely opened upon

heaven’s gate. This was the purple steep, the _purpureum ascensum_, of

martyrdom. Caesar was not alone in thinking thus, as to the saving close

of Engelbert’s career; for a devout and learned priest, who in earlier

years had been co-canon with Engelbert, said to Caesar after the

archbishop’s murder: “I do not think there was another way through which a

man so placed (_in statu tali positus_) could have entered the door of the

kingdom of heaven, which is narrow.”

Caesar tells the story of this martyrdom in all its causes and details of

plot. That plot succeeded because it was the envenomed culmination of the

hatred for the archbishop felt by the nobles--bishops among them too--whom

he restrained with his authority and unhesitating hand. Frederic, Count of

Isenburg, a kinsman of Engelbert as well as of the former archbishop, was

the feudal warden of the nunnery of Essen, which he greedily oppressed.

The abbess turned to Engelbert, as she had to his predecessor. The

archbishop hesitated to proceed against a relative. So the abbess appealed

to Rome. Papal letters came back causing Engelbert to take the matter up.

He acted with forbearance and generosity; for he even offered to make up

from his own revenues any loss the count might sustain from acting justly

toward the nunnery. In vain. Frederic, so we read, would have none of his

interference. The devil hardened his heart; and he began to incite his

friends and kinsmen (who were also the kin of Engelbert) to a treacherous

attack upon the man they could not openly withstand.

Rumours of the plot were in the air. Said a monk of Heisterbach to his

abbot: “Lord, if you have any business with the archbishop, do it quickly,

for his death is near.” Engelbert himself was not unwarned. A letter came

to him revealing the matter. Upon reading it, he threw it in the fire. Yet

he told its contents to his friend the Bishop of Minden, who was present.

Said the latter: “Have a care for thyself, my lord, for God’s sake, and

not for thyself alone, but for the welfare of your church and the safety

of the whole land.”

The archbishop answered: “Dangers are all about me, and what I should do

the Lord knows and not I. Woe is me, if I keep quiet! Yet if I should

accuse them of this matter, they would complain to every one that I was

fastening the crime of parricide on them. From this hour I commit my body

and soul to the divine care.”

“Then taking the bishop alone into his chapel, he began to confess all

his sins from his very youth, with a shower of tears that wetted all

his breast, and, as we hope, washed the stains from his heart. And

when the Lord of Minden said: ‘I fear there is still something on thy

conscience which thou hast not told me,’ he answered: ‘The Lord knows

that I have concealed nothing consciously.’ But thinking over his sins

more fully, the next morning he took his confessor again into the same

chapel and with meek and contrite soul and floods of tears confessed

everything that had recurred to his mind. Then his conscience being

clear, he said fearlessly: ‘Now let God’s will regarding me be done.’

“In the meanwhile some one was knocking at the door of the chapel. The

archbishop would not let it be opened because his eyes were wet with

tears. But the knocking continued, and it was announced that the

bishops of Osnabrück and Münster (brothers of Count Frederic) were

there. After he had dried his eyes and wiped his face, he allowed them

to be shown in, and said when they had entered: ‘You lords both are

kin of mine, and I have injured you in nothing, as you know well, but

have advanced your interests, as I might, and your brother’s also. And

look you, from all sides by word and letter I hear that your brother

Count Frederic, whom I have loved heartily and never harmed, is

devising ill to me and seeks to kill me.’

“They protested, trembling in their deceit: ‘Lord, may this never,

never, be! You need have no fear; such a thought has never entered his

heart. We all have been honoured and enriched and lifted up by you.’

Which last was true.”

This was after the festival of All Saints in the first days of November

1225; and Count Frederic, the better to conceal his purpose, came and

accepted the archbishop’s terms. Together they set out from Cologne, the

count knowing that the now unsuspecting Engelbert would stop the next day

to dedicate a church at Swelm. So it turned out, and the count took that

opportunity to excuse himself and rode off to set his men in ambush. Just

then a widow rose up from the roadside, and demanded judgment as to a fief

withheld from her. At once the archbishop dismounted, and took his seat as

duke to hear the cause. It went against the widow, and in favour of him

who sat as judge. But he said: “Lady, this fief which you demand is taken

from you by decree and adjudged to me. But for the sake of God, pitying

your distress, I relinquish it to you.”

The archbishop rode on. About midday Frederic came up again to see which

way he was taking. Engelbert invited the count to pass the night with him.

But he declined on some pretext, and rode away. The archbishop and his

company proceeded on their road until the hour of vespers. Vespers were

said, and again the count appeared. Observing him, a nobleman in

Engelbert’s train said: “My lord, this coming and going of the count looks

suspicious. For the third time he is approaching, and now not as before on

his palfrey but on his war-horse. I advise you to mount your war-horse

too.”

But the archbishop said that would be too noticeable, and there was

nothing to fear. As the count drew near, they saw that the colour had left

his face. The archbishop spoke to him: “Now, kinsman, I am sure you will

stay with me.” He answered nothing, and they went on together. Suspicious

and alarmed, some of the clergy and some of the knights withdrew, so that

but a small company remained; for a good part of the episcopal household

with the cooks had gone ahead to prepare the night’s lodgings.

It was dusk as they drew near the place of ambush. The count grew

agitated, and was blaming himself to his followers for planning to kill

his lord and kinsman, but they egged him on. Now the foot of the Gevelberg

was reached, and the count said as they began to ascend, “My lord, this is

our path.” “May the Lord protect us,” replied Engelbert, for he was not

without suspicion.

The company was entering the hollow way leading over the summit of the

mountain, when suddenly the followers of Frederic, who were ahead, turned

on them, and others leaped from hiding, while a shrill whistle sounded,

startling the horses. “My lord, mount your war-horse; death is at the

door,” cried a knight. It was indeed. The archbishop’s company made no

resistance, except the faithful noble who first had scented danger. The

rest fled while the murderers rushed upon Engelbert, unable to turn in the

narrow way, and struck at him with swords and daggers. One seized him by

the cloak and the two rolled together on the ground; but the strong and

active prelate dragged himself and his antagonist out of the roadway into

a thicket. There he was again set upon by the mad crew, urged on by the

count, and was hacked and stabbed to death. He breathed his last beneath

an oak ten paces from the roadway.

There is no need to recount the finding of the gashed and stripped body,

its solemn interment in the Cathedral Church of St. Peter’s at Cologne,

the canonization of Engelbert, and the building of a chapel, succeeded by

a cloister, to mark the place of his martyrdom. Nor need one follow with

Caesar the banning of the murderers, and the unhappy ways in which their

deaths made part atonement for the injury which their wicked deed had done

the German realm.[621]

* * * * *

The ideals and shortcomings of monasticism were closely connected with

popular beliefs. The monastic ideal had its inception in the thought of

sin as entailing either purgatorial or everlasting punishment, and in the

thought of holiness as ensuring eternal bliss. Whatever other motives

participated, the knot of the monastic purpose was held in the jaws of

this antithesis, which for itself drew form, colour, picturesqueness, from

popular beliefs, and was made tangible in countless stories telling of

purity and love and meekness impaired by lust and cruelty and pride, and

of retribution avoided by some shifty supernatural adjustment of the sin.

Such stories might be accepted as well by the learned as by the

illiterate. The brooding soul of the Middle Ages, with its knowledge of

humanity and its reaches of spiritual insight, was undisturbed by the

crass superstitions so queerly at odds with its deeper inspiration--a

remark specifically applicable to thoughtful or spiritually-minded

individuals in the mediaeval centuries.

As we descend the spiritual scale, the crude superstitious elements become

more prominent or apparently the whole matter. Likewise as we descend the

moral scale; for the more vicious the individual, the more utterly will he

omit the spiritual from his working faith, and the more mechanical will be

his methods of squaring his conduct with his fears of the supernatural.

Nevertheless, in estimating the ethical shortcomings of mediaeval

superstitions, one must remember how easily in a simple mind all sorts of

superstition may co-exist with a sweet religious and moral tone.

Sins unatoned for and uncondoned bring purgatorial or perpetual torment

after death, even as holiness brings eternal bliss. But how were sins

thought to come to men and women in the Middle Ages, and especially to

those who were earnestly striving to escape them? Rather than fruit of the

naughtiness of the human heart, they came through the malicious

suggestions, the temptations, of a Tempter. They were in fine the

machinations of the devil. This was the popular view, and also the

authoritative doctrine, expressed, re-expressed, and enforced in myriad

examples, by all the saints and magnates of the Church who had lived since

the time when Athanasius wrote the life of Anthony in devil-fighting

heroics.

Against the devil, every man had staunch allies; the readiest were the

Virgin Mary and the saints, for Christ was very high above the conflict,

and at the Judgment Day must be its final umpire. The object of the

cunning enemy was to trip man into hell, an object hostile alike to God

and man. Saintly aid enabled man to overcome the devil, or if he succumbed

to temptation and committed mortal sin, there was still a chance to

frustrate the devil’s plot, and save the soul by wiles or force. The

sinner may use every stratagem to defeat the devil and escape the results

of sins committed by himself, but prompted by his enemy. This was war and

the ethics of war, in which man was the central struggling figure,

attacked by the devil and defended by the saints. The latter also help

man’s earthly fortunes, and devotion to them may ensure one’s welfare in

this very palpable and pressing life of earth.

This popular and yet authoritative view of mortal peril and saintly aid is

illustrated in the tales from sermons and other pious writings. In them

any uncanny or untoward experience was ascribed to the devil. So it was in

monkish Chronicles, _Vitae sanctorum_, _Dialogi miraculorum_, or indeed in

any edifying writing couched in narrative form or containing illustrative

tales. Throughout this literature the devil inspires evil thoughts,

instigates crimes, and causes any unhappy or immoral happening. It is just

as much a matter of course as if one should say to-day, I have a cold, or

John stole a ring, or James misbehaved with So-and-so.[622] Any man might

meet the devil, and if sinful, suffer physical violence from him. If any

one disappeared the devil might be supposed to have carried him off.

Details of the abduction might be given, or the whole matter take place

before witnesses.

“A rich usurer, with little fear of God in him, had dined well one

evening, and was in bed with his wife, when he suddenly leaped up. She

asked what ailed him. He replied: ‘I was just snatched away to God’s

judgment seat, where I heard so many accusations that I did not know

what to answer. And while I waited for something to happen, I heard

the final sentence given against me, that I should be handed over to

demons, who were to come and get me to-day.’ Saying this, he flung on

a coat, and ran out of the house, for all his wife could do to stop

him. His servants, following, discovered him almost crazed in a church

where monks were saying their matins. There they kept him in custody

for some hours. But he made no sign of willingness to confess or make

restitution or repent. So after mass they led him back toward his

house, and as they came by a river, a boat was seen coming rapidly up

against the current, manned apparently by no one. But the usurer said

that it was full of demons, who had come to take him. The words were

no sooner uttered, than he was seized by them, and put in the boat,

which suddenly turned on its course and disappeared with its

prey.”[623]

One observes that this usurer had received sentence at God’s tribunal, and

the devils carried it out: the sentence gave them power. Any man may be

tempted; but falls into his enemy’s power only by sinning. His yielding is

an act of acquiescence in the devil’s will, and may be the commencement of

a state of permanent consent. With this we reach the notion of a formal

pact with the devil, of which there were many instances. But still the

pact is with the Enemy; the man is not bound beyond the letter, and may

escape by any trick. It is still the ethics of war; we are very close to

the principle that a man by stratagem or narrow observance of the letter

may escape the eternal retribution which God decrees conditionally and the

devil delights in.

The sacraments prescribed by the Church were the common means of escaping

future punishment. Confession is an example. The correct doctrine was that

without penitence it was ineffective. But popularly the confession

represented the whole fact. It was efficacious of itself, and kept the

soul from hell. It might even prevent retribution in this life. Caesar of

Heisterbach has a number of illustrative stories, rather immoral as they

seem to us. There was, for instance, a person possessed (_obsessus_) of a

devil who dwelt in him, and through his lips would make known the

_unconfessed_ sins of any one brought before him; but the devil could not

remember sins which had been confessed. A certain knight suspected (quite

correctly) a priest of sinning with his wife. So he haled him before this

_obsessus_. On the way the priest managed to elude his persecutor for an

instant, and, darting into a barn, confessed his sin to a layman he found

there. Returning, he went along with the knight, and, behold, the sin was

obliterated from the memory of the devil in the _obsessus_, and the priest

remained undetected.[624]

Men and women sometimes escaped the wages of sin by the aid of a saint,

but more often through the incarnate pity of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin

and the saints were ready to take up any cause, however desperate, against

the devil; which means that they were ready to intervene between the

sinner and the impending punishment. People took kindly to these thoughts

of irregular intervention, since everlasting torment for transient sin was

so extreme; but a surer source of their approval lay in the incomplete

spiritualization of the popular religion and its ethics.

To thwart the devil was the office of the Virgin and the saints. Their aid

was given when it was besought. Sometimes they intervened voluntarily to

protect a votary whose devotions had won their favour. The stories of the

pitying intervention of the Virgin to save the sinner from the wages of

his sin, and frustrate the devil, are among the fragrant flowers of the

mediaeval spirit. Ethically some of them leave much to ask for; but others

are tales of sweet forgiveness upon heart-felt repentance.

Jacques of Vitry has a story (scarcely fit to repeat) of a certain very

religious Roman widow-lady, who had an only son, with whom she sinned at

the devil’s instigation. She was a devoted worshipper of the Virgin; and

the devil, fearing that she would repent, plotted to bring her to trial

and immediate condemnation before the emperor’s tribunal, for her incest.

When the widow knew of her impending ruin, she went with tears to the

confessional, and then day and night besought the Virgin to deliver her

from infamy and death. The day of trial came. Suddenly the accuser, who

was the devil in disguise, began to quake and groan, and could not answer

when the emperor asked what ailed him. But as the woman drew near the

judgment seat, he uttered a horrid howl, exclaiming: “See! Mary is coming

with the woman, holding her hand.” And in a fetid whirlwind he

disappeared. “And thus,” says Jacques of Vitry, “the widow was set free

through confession and the Virgin’s aid, and afterwards persevered in the

service of God more cautiously.”[625]

Such a tale sounds immoral; yet there is some good in saving any soul from

hell; and here there was repentance. Caesar of Heisterbach has another, of

the Virgin taking the place of a sinning nun in the convent until she

repented and returned. Again repentance and forgiveness make the sinner

whole.[626]

The _Miracles de Nostre Dame_[627] are an interesting repertory of the

Virgin’s interventions. These “Mysteries” or miracle plays in Old French

verse are naïve enough in their kindly stratagems, by which the votary is

saved from punishment in this life and his soul from torment in the next.

The first “Miracle” in this collection runs thus: A pious dame and her

knightly husband, from devotion to the Virgin Mary took the not unusual

vow of married continence. But under diabolic incitement, the knight

over-persuaded his lady, who in her chagrin at the broken vow devoted the

offspring to the devil. A son was born, and in due time the devil came to

claim it. Thereupon a huge machinery, of pope and cardinals, hermits and

archangels, is set in motion. At last the case is brought before God,

where the devils show cause on one side, and “Nostre Dame” pleads on the

other. Our Lady wins on the ground that the mother could not devote her

offspring to the devil without the father’s consent, which was not shown.

There is surely no harm in this pleasant drama; for the devil ought not to

have had the boy. But there follow quite different “Miracles” of Our Lady.

The next one is typical. An abbess sins with her clerk. Her condition is

observed by the nuns, and the bishop is informed. The abbess casts herself

on the mercy of Mary, who miraculously delivers her of the child and gives

it into the care of a holy hermit. An examination of the abbess takes

place, after which she is declared innocent by the bishop. But she is at

once moved to repentance, and confesses all to him. In the bishop’s mind,

however, the Virgin’s intervention is sufficient proof of the abbess’s

holiness. He absolves her, and goes to the hermitage and takes charge of

the child.[628]

Such is an example of the kindly but peculiar miracles, in which the

Virgin saves her friends who turn to her and repent. Many other tales,

quite lovely and unobjectionable, are told of her: how she keeps her

tempted votaries from sinning, or helps them to repent:[629] or blesses

and leads on to joy those who need no forgiveness. Such a one was the

monk-scribe who illuminated Mary’s blessed name in three lovely colours

whenever it occurred in the works he copied, and then kissed it devoutly.

As he lay very ill, having received the sacraments, another brother saw in

vision the Virgin hover above his couch and heard her say: “Fear not, son,

thou shalt rejoice with the dwellers in heaven, because thou didst honour

my name with such care. Thine own name is written in the book of life.

Arise and come with me.” Running to the infirmary the brother found his

brother dying blissfully.[630]

There are lovely stories too of passionate repentance, coming

unmiraculously to those devoutly thinking on the Virgin and her infant

Son. “For there was once a nun who forsook her convent and became a

prostitute, but returned after many years. As she thought of God’s

judgment and the pains of hell, she despaired of ever gaining pardon; as

she thought of Paradise, she deemed that she, impure, could never enter

there; and when she thought upon the Passion, and how great ills Christ

had borne for her and how great sins she had committed, she still was

without hope. But on the Day of the Nativity she began to think that unto

us a Child is born, and that children are appeased easily. Before the

image of the Virgin she began to think of the Saviour’s infancy, and, with

floods of passionate tears, besought the Child through the benignity of

His childhood to have mercy upon her. She heard a voice saying to her that

through the benignity of that childhood which she had invoked, her sins

were forgiven.”[631]

But enough of these stories. Nor is there need to enlarge upon the

relic-worship and other superstitions of the Middle Ages. One sees such

matters on every side. It was all a matter of course, and disapprovals

were rare. Such conceptions of sin and the devil’s part in it affected the

morality of clergy as well as laity. The morals of the latter could not

rise above those of their instructors; and the layman’s religion of

masses, veneration of relics, pilgrimages, almsgiving and endowment of

monasteries, scarcely interfered with the cruelty and rapine to which he

might be addicted.

CHAPTER XXI

THE WORLD OF SALIMBENE

At the close of this long survey of the saintly ideals and actualities of

the Middle Ages, it will be illuminating to look abroad over mediaeval

life through the half mystic but most observant eyes of a certain Italian

Franciscan. The Middle Ages were not characterized by the open eye.

Mediaeval Chronicles and _Vitae_ rarely afford a broad and variegated

picture of the world. As they were so largely the work of monks, obviously

they would set forth only what would strike the monastic eye, an eye often

intense with its inner vision, but not wide open to the occurrences of

life. The monk was not a good observer, commonly from lack of sympathy and

understanding. Of course there were exceptions; one of them was the

Franciscan Salimbene, an undeniable if not too loving son of an alert

north Italian city, Parma.

Humanism springs from cities; and it began in Italy long before Petrarch.

North of the Alps there was nothing like the city life of Italy, so quick

and voluble, so unreticent and unrestrained, open and

neighbourly--neighbours hate as well as love! From Cicero’s time, from

Numa’s if one will, Italian life was what it never ceased to be, urban.

The city was the centre and the bound of human intercourse, almost of

human sympathy. This was always true; as true in those devastated seventh,

eighth, and ninth centuries as before or after; certainly true of the

tenth and eleventh centuries when the Lombards and other Teuton children

of the waste and forest had become good urban Italians. It was still more

abundantly true of the following centuries when life was burgeoning with

power. Whatever other cause or source of parentage it had, humanism was a

city child. And as city life never ceased in Italy, that land had no

unhumanistic period. There humanism always existed, whether we take it in

the narrower sense of love of humanistic, that is, antique literature, or

take it broadly as in the words of old Menander-Terence: “homo sum, humani

nil a me alienum.”

Now turn to the close of the twelfth century, and look at Francis of

Assisi. It is his humanism and his naturalism, his interest in men and

women, and in bird and beast as well, that fills this sweet lover of

Christ with tender sympathy for them all. Through him human interest and

love of man drew monasticism from its cloister, and sent it forth upon an

unhampered ministry of love. Francis (God bless him!) had not been

Francis, had he not been Francis _of Assisi_.

A certain gifted well-born city child was five years old when Francis

died. It was to be his lot to paint for posterity a picture of his world

such as no man had painted before; and in all his work no line suggests so

many reasons for the differences between Italy and the lands north of the

Alps, and also so many why Salimbene happened to be what he was, as this

remark, relating to his French tour: “In France _only the townspeople_

dwell in the towns; the knights and noble ladies stay in their villas and

on their own domains.”

Only the townspeople live in the towns, merchants, craftsmen,

artisans--the unleavened bourgeoisie! In Lombardy how different! There

knights and nobles, and their lovely ladies, have their strong dwellings

in the towns; jostle with the townspeople, converse with them, intermarry

sometimes, lord it over them when they can, hate them, murder them. But

there they are, and what variety and colour and picturesqueness and

illumination do they not add to city life? If a Lombardy town thronged

with merchants and craftsmen, it was also gay and voluptuous with knights

and ladies. How rich and fascinating its life compared with the grey towns

beyond the Alps. In France the townspeople made an audience for the

Fabliaux! The Italian town had also its courtly audience of knight and

dame for the love lyrics of the troubadour, and for the romances of

chivalry. In fact, the whole world was there, and not just workaday,

sorry, parts of it.

Had it not been for the full and varied city life in which he was born and

bred, the quick-eyed youth would not have had that fund of human interest

and intuition which makes him so pleasant and so different from any one

north of the Alps in the thirteenth century. A city boy indeed, and what a

full personality! He was to be a man of human curiosity, a tireless

sight-seer. His interest is universal; his human love quick enough--for

those he loved; for he was no saint, although a Minorite. His detestation

is vivid, illuminating; it brings the hated man before us. And Salimbene’s

wide-open eyes are his own. He sees with a fresh vision; he is himself; a

man of temperament, which lends its colours to the panorama. His own

interest or curiosity is paramount with him; so his narrative will naïvely

follow his sweet will and whim, and pass from topic to topic in chase of

the suggestions of his thoughts.

The result is for us a unique treasure-trove. The story presents the world

and something more; two worlds, if you will, very co-related:

_macrocosmos_ and _microcosmos_, the world without and the very eager ego,

Salimbene. There he is unfailingly, the writer in his world. Scarcely

another mediaeval penman so naïvely shows the world he moves about in and

himself. Let us follow, for a little, his autobiographic chronicle, taking

the liberty which he always took, of selecting as we choose.[632]

In the year 1221 Salimbene was born at Parma, into the very centre of the

world of strife between popes and emperors--a world wherein also the

renewed Gospel was being preached by Francis of Assisi, who did not die

till five years later. But St. Dominic died the year of Salimbene’s birth.

Innocent III., most powerful of popes, had breathed his last five years

before, leaving surviving him that viper-nursling of the papacy, Frederick

II., an able, much-experienced youth of twenty-two. Frederick was

afterwards crowned emperor by Honorius III., and soon showed himself the

most resourceful of his Hohenstaufen line of arch-enemies to the papacy.

This Emperor Frederick, whom Innocent III., says Salimbene, had exalted

and named “Son of the Church” ... “was a man pestiferous and accursed, a

schismatic, heretic, and epicurean, who corrupted the whole earth.”[633]

Salimbene’s family was in high regard at Parma, and the boy naturally saw

and perhaps met the interesting strangers coming to the town. He tells us

that when he was baptized the lord Balianus of Sydon, a great baron of

France, a retainer of the Emperor Frederick’s, “lifted me from the sacred

font.” The mother was a pious dame, whom Salimbene loved none too well,

because once she snatched up his infant sisters to flee from the danger of

the Baptistery toppling over upon their house during an earthquake, and

left Salimbene himself lying in his cradle! The father had been a

crusader, and was a man of wealth and influence.

So the youth was born into a stirring swirl of life. These vigorous

northern Italian cities hated each other shrewdly in the thirteenth

century. When the boy was eight years old a great fight took place between

the folk of Parma, Modena, and Cremona on the one side, and that big

blustering Bologna. Hot was the battle. On the _Carrocio_ of Parma only

one man remained; for it was stripped of its defenders by the stones from

those novel war-engines of the Bolognese, called _manganellae_.

Nevertheless the three towns won the battle, and the Bolognese turned

their backs and abandoned their own _Carrocio_. The Cremona people wanted

to drag it within their walls; but the prudent Parma leaders prevented it,

because such action would have been an insult forever, and a lasting cause

of war with a strong enemy. But Salimbene saw the captured _manganellae_

brought as trophies into his city.

Other scenes of more peaceful rejoicing came before his eyes; as in the

year 1233, he being twelve years old. That was a year of alleluia, as it

was afterwards called,

“to wit a time of peace and quiet, of joy, jollity and merry-making,

of praise and jubilee; because wars were over. Horse and foot,

townsfolk and rustics, youths and virgins, old and young, sang songs

and hymns. There was such devotion in all the cities of Italy. And I

saw that each quarter of the city would have its banner in the

procession, a banner on which was painted the figure of its

martyr-saint. And men and women, boys and girls, thronged from the

villages to the city with their flags, to hear the preaching, and

praise God. They had branches of trees and lighted candles. There was

preaching morning, noon, and evening, and _stationes_ arranged in

churches and squares; and they lifted their hands to God to praise and

bless Him forever. Nor could they cease, so drunk were they with love

divine. There was no wrath among them, or disquiet or rancour.

Everything was peaceful and benign; I saw it with my eyes.”[634]

And then Salimbene tells of all the famous preachers, and the lovely

hymns, and Ave Marias; Frater So-and-so, from Bologna; Frater So-and-so

from somewhere else; Minorite and Preaching friar.

One might almost fancy himself in the Florence of Savonarola. Like enough

this season of soul outpour and tears and songs of joy first stirred the

religious temper of this quickly moved youth. These were also the great

days of dawning for the Friars. Dominic was not yet sainted; yet his Order

of the Preaching Friars was growing. The blessed Francis had been

canonized;--sainted had he been indeed before his death! And the world was

turning to these novel, open, sympathetic brethren who were pouring

themselves through Europe. Love’s mendicancy, envied but not yet

discredited, was before men’s eyes and in men’s thoughts; and what

opportunity it offered of helping people, of saving one’s own soul, and of

seeing the world! We can guess how Salimbene’s temper was drawn by it. We

know at least that one of these friars, Brother Girard of Modena, who

preached at this jubilee in Parma, was the man who made petition five

years later for Salimbene, so that the Minister-General of the Minorites,

Brother Elias, being then at Parma, received the seventeen-year-old boy

into the Order, in the year 1238.

Salimbene’s father was frantic at the loss of his heir. Never while he

lived did he cease to lament it. He at once began strenuous appeals to

have his son returned to him. Salimbene’s account of this, exhibits

himself, his father, and the situation.

“He complained to the emperor (Frederick II.), who had come to Parma,

that the brothers Minorites had taken his son from him. The emperor

wrote to Brother Elias that if he held his favour dear, he should

listen to him and return me to my father. Then my father went to

Assisi, where Brother Elias was, and placed in his hands the emperor’s

letter, which began: ‘In order to mitigate the sighs of our faithful

Guido de Adam,’ and so forth. Brother Illuminatus, Brother Elias’s

scribe, showed me this letter long afterwards, when I was with him in

the convent at Siena.

“When the imperial letter had been read, Brother Elias wrote at once

to the brethren of the convent at Fano, where I dwelt, that if I

wished it, they should return me to my father without delay; but that

if I did not wish to go with my father, they should guard and keep me

as the pupil of his eye.

“A number of knights came with my father to Fano, to see the end of my

affair. There was I and my salvation made the centre of the spectacle.

The brethren were assembled, with them of the world; and there was

much talk. My father produced the letter of the minister-general, and

showed it to the brothers. When it was read, Brother Jeremiah, who was

in charge of me, answered my father in the hearing of all: ‘Lord

Guido, we sympathize with your distress, and are prepared to obey the

letter of our father. Behold, here is your son; he is old enough; let

him speak for himself. Ask him; if he wishes to go with you, let him

in God’s name; if not, we cannot force him.’

“My father asked me whether I wished to go with him or not. I replied,

No; because the Lord says, ‘No one putting his hand to the plow and

looking back is fit for the kingdom of God.’

“And father said to me: ‘Thou carest not for thy father and mother,

who are afflicted with many griefs for thee.’

“I replied: ‘Truly I do not care, because the Lord says, Who loveth

father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. But of thee He also

says: Who loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.

Thou oughtest to care, father, for Him who hung on the cross for us,

that He might give us eternal life. For it is himself who says: I am

come to set a man against his father, and the daughter against her

mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s

foes are they of his household.’

“The brethren wondered and rejoiced that I said such things to my

father. And then my father said: ‘You have bewitched and deceived my

son, so that he will not mind me. I will complain again of you to the

emperor and to the minister-general. Now let me speak with my son

apart from you; and you will see him follow me without delay.’

“So the brothers allowed me to talk with him alone; for they began to

have a little confidence in me, because of my words. Yet they listened

behind the wall to what we should say. For they trembled as a reed in

water, lest my father should alter my mind with his blandishments. And

not for me alone they feared, but lest my return should hinder others

from entering the Order.

“Then my father said to me: ‘Dear son, don’t believe those nasty

tunics[635] who have deceived you; but come with me, and I will give

you all I have.’

“And I replied: ‘Go away, father. As the Wise Man says in Proverbs,

Thou shall not hinder him to do right, who is able.’

“And my father answered with tears, and said to me: ‘What then, son,

shall I say to thy mother, who is afflicted because of thee?’

“And I say to him: ‘Thou shalt tell her from me; thus says thy son: My

father and mother have forsaken me, and the Lord hath taken me up;

also (Jer. iii.): Thou shalt call me Father, and walk after me in my

steps.... It is good for a man when he has borne the yoke from his

youth.’

“Hearing all these things my father, despairing of my coming out,

threw himself down in the presence of the brethren and the secular

folk who had come with him, and said: ‘I give thee to a thousand

devils, cursed son, thee and thy brother here who has deceived thee.

My curse be on you forever, and may it commend you to the spirits of

hell.’ And he went away excited beyond measure; while we remained

greatly comforted and giving thanks to our God, and saying to each

other, ‘They shall curse, and thou shalt bless.’ Likewise the seculars

retired edified at my constancy. The brethren also rejoiced seeing

what the Lord had wrought through me, His little boy.”

This whole scene presents such a conflict as the thirteenth century

witnessed daily, and the twelfth, and other mediaeval centuries as well.

The letters of St. Bernard set forth situations quite as extreme or

outrageous, from modern points of view. And Bernard can apply (or shall we

say, distort?) Scripture in the same drastic fashion. But these monks

meant it deeply; and from their standpoint they were in the right with

their quotations. The attitude goes back to Jerome; that a man’s father

and mother, and they of his own household, may be his worst enemies, if

they seek to hinder his feet set toward God. Of course we can see the

sensible, worldly, martial father of the youth leap in the air and roll on

the ground in rage; flesh and blood could not stand such turn of

Scripture: Tell my weeping mother (who so longs for me) that I say my

father and mother have forsaken me, and the Lord hath taken me up! This

came to the Lord Guido as a maddening gibe; but Salimbene meant simply

that his parents did not care for his highest welfare, and the Lord had

received him into the path of salvation. It is all a scene, which should

evoke our serious reflections--after which it may be permitted us to enjoy

it as we will.

In his conscience Salimbene felt justified; for a dream set the seal of

divine approval on his conduct.

“The Blessed Virgin rewarded me that very night. For it seemed to me

that I was lying prostrate in prayer before her altar, as the brothers

are wont when they rise for matins. And I heard the voice of the

Blessed Virgin calling me. Lifting my face, I saw her sitting above

the altar in that place where is set the host and the calix. She had

her little boy in her lap, and she held him out to me, saying:

‘Approach without fear and kiss my son, whom yesterday thou didst

confess before men.’ And when I was afraid, I saw that the little boy

gladly stretched out his arms. Trusting his innocence and the

graciousness of his mother, I drew near, embraced and kissed him; and

the benign mother gave him to me for a long while. And when I could

not have enough of it, the Blessed Virgin blessed me and said: ‘Go,

beloved son, and lie down, lest the brothers rising from matins find

thee here with us.’ I obeyed, and the vision disappeared; but

unspeakable sweetness remained in my heart. Never in the world have I

had such bliss.”

From this we see that Salimbene had sufficient mystic ardour to keep him a

happy Franciscan. It made the otherworldly part of one who also was a

merry gossip among his fellows. An inner power of spiritual enthusiasm

and fantasy accompanied him through his life, giving him a double point of

view: he looks at things as they are, with curiosity and interest, and

ever and anon loses himself in transcendental dreams of Paradise and all

at last made perfect.[636]

Although the father had devoted his son to a thousand devils, he did not

cease from attempts, by persuasion and even violence, to draw him back

into his own civic and martial world. So the young man got permission from

the minister-general to go and live in Tuscany, where he might be beyond

the reach of parental activities. “Thereupon I went and lived in Tuscany

for eight years, two of them at Lucca, two at Siena, and four at Pisa.” He

gained great comfort from converse and gossip of an edifying kind, as he

fell in with those loving enthusiasts who had received their cloaks from

the hand of the blessed Francis himself. At Siena he saw much of Brother

Bernard of Quintavalle who had been the very first to receive the dress of

the Order from the hand of its founder. Salimbene gladly listened to his

recollections of Francis, who in this venerable disciple’s words might

seem once more to walk the earth.

Yet Salimbene, still young in heart and years, could readily take up with

the companionship of the ne’er-do-well vagabonds who frequently attached

themselves, as lay brothers, to the Franciscan Order. He tells of a day’s

outing with one of whose character he is outspoken but without personal

repugnance: