bethought her of another shelter, humble indeed, but safe. And she had
left home only to be humbled. What humiliation would there have been in
entering, like the dear St. Elizabeth, the holy order of St. Francis? Or
what abasement had she, like her brother, embraced the rule of Dominic,
“dearest to me,” she avers, “of all the saints”? Here there was no
spiritual sacrifice. And what sacrifice of life, of social habit, of
esteem could she have made had she entered one of the great Cistercian
or Benedictine convents, where the nobles of Saxony and Thuringia were
proud to send their daughters? Mechtild was glad that they had rejected
her; it seemed to her that at last, pure of pride, free of weak desire,
she saw her own will made plain and the directing will of God.
She moved now; she knew what to do and where to go; she was no longer
unguided and alone. She went to the beguinage, the home of mendicant
widows, the almshouse of the holy poor who gave themselves to God. At
that door, which debarred no one from the outer world, Mechtild knocked.
A poor woman opened to her, clad in a plain smock and a great mantle
covering head and shoulders. Such another gown and cloak was lying by,
ready for the welcome Mechtild. She entered the house.
That night Mechtild stood in her little cell. It was much like any
convent cell; but it was without a convent’s restrictions or its
privileges. Mechtild might quit those walls this year, next year, any
year. She might marry and have children. She had, after all, offered up
no sacrifice of her own body; she was not dead to the world, but was to
live and labour in it more nearly now than in her father’s castle. No
great barrier should stand henceforth between her soul and sin. The
battle was not over; it was but just begun.
Far easier had been the greater sacrifice, done once and done for ever!
Far more peaceful the quiet nunnery, hallowed to rapture and seclusion!
Mechtild was now the servant only, and not the bride of Christ. She was
a Beguine, not a nun. The accomplished daughter of nobles, she was the
companion of the destitute and lowly. It was better thus, better to be
lowly and despised, even as Christ was despised. All these thoughts of
dismay, rapture, weariness, and exaltation, rushed and clashed through
the tired breast of Mechtild. Then, for a second time, the trance crept
over her, and she sank unconscious into the ever-present arms of God.
Then, in a vision, Mechtild saw how henceforward her life should be
doubly glorious and doubly beset with peril. For she beheld the angel
and the devil, who to this moment had been permitted to guide her and
assail her, each miraculously changed into twain. Now at her right there
stood a cherub, with gifts and holy wisdom on his azure wings, and a
seraph bearing her a heart of love. But on the left two devils watched
her—two devils who, in all times, have lain in wait for the mystic and
the solitary visionary. And the name of the one was Vain-Glory, and that
of the other Vain-Desire.
VI.
From the night of that vision begins the career of Mechtild and the
history of her visions and her prophecies. At first, indeed, occupied in
conquering her strong and lusty youth, the visions of Mechtild of
Magdeburg are little different from those of any convent saint. Angels
and devils, the beautiful manhood of our Lord, fragments from the Song
of Solomon, the rapture of the Spiritual Nuptials—such are the
inevitable themes. But this woman, we feel, is no mere Gertrude or
Mechtild of Hackeborn. The whole world interests her, and the destinies
of the world. In reading the book in which she wrote her visions, the
book of the flowing light of Godhead, we soon pass over this initial
stage to a second and wider phase.
“Ich habe gesehen ein Stat;
Ihr Name ist die ewige Hass.”
These pregnant words begin Mechtild’s “Vision of Hell.” The plan of this
great vision, which beholds, built in succeeding and widening terraces,
the habitations of sinners, with fire and darkness, stench and cold, and
pain in the bottommost pit, no less than the scheme of the poem, which
lashes many a prevalent sin of the Church, both alike recall a far
greater poet yet unborn, one who should also explore the depths of hell
and the heights of heaven, one who should accept as his guide towards
Paradise a certain mysterious Matilda,
“Cantando come donna innamorata,”
in whom the learned Herr Preger has recognized our earnest minstrel of
heaven, the loving and singing Mechtild of Magdeburg.
The form of Mechtild’s visions did not make her popular among the
churchmen of her city. The people caught up the lilting, dancing
measures of her songs. The pious sang her visions. And girls, to whom a
nun had ever seemed a cold and sacred being, could understand the happy
verses of the fearless love of God, in which Mechtild claims for herself
an impulse as natural, as irresistible, as any maiden’s love of her
betrothed:—
“Das ist eine kindische Liebe,
Dass man Kinder saüge und wiege;
Ich bin eine vollgewachsene Braut,
Ich will gehen nach meinem Traut.
“Ich stürbe gerne von Minnen
Seine Augen in meine Augen,
Sein Herz in mein Herze,
Sein Seele in meine Seele
Umfangen und umschlossen.
“Der Fisch mag in dem Wasser nicht ertrinken,
Der Vogel in den Lüften nicht versinken,
Das Gold mag in dem Feuer nicht verderben;
Wie möchte ich denn meiner Natur widerstehn?”
In the convents of Helfta and Quedlinburg these songs spread and
furthered the great renown of Mechtild. Heinrich von Halle, the famous
Dominican, went to see her, and became her friend. But the secular
priests did not love her, this Beguine reformer, this new unsanctioned
Abbess Hildegard, who saw so clearly and bewailed so explicitly the many
corruptions which had crept upon the Church even in that age of faith,
even in the century of St. Francis and St. Dominic, of King Louis and
Elizabeth of Hungary. Some of these secular priests tried to burn her
book; thereupon Mechtild saw a vision and heard the voice of God crying
aloud: “_Lieb’ meine, betrübe dich nicht zu sehr, die Wahrheit mag
niemand verbrennen._”
Profound and touching phrase, motto of all martyrs and of every cause:
No one can burn the Truth! Had the world but learned by heart this one
poignant sentence, uttered in the very age which began the persecution
of heretics, how many wars, deaths, angers, cruelties, centuries of
remorse and hatred had not the world been spared! All honour to this
woman, who, six centuries ago, perceived how vain it is to hunt, slay,
burn, exterminate an idea. This sentence should be immortal.
Mechtild continued to speak what seemed to her the most necessary truth.
“Pope and priests,” she cries, “are going the road to hell. Unless they
quit their sensuality, their spiritual negligence, their temporal greed,
fearful disasters will overwhelm them.” “In this book,” she says, “I
write with my heart’s blood.” She is no unfilial antagonist threatening
the power of Rome, but a daughter striving to lead her parent back into
the holy way. She has a vision, and sees perverted Christendom lying,
“like an impure virgin,” far from the throne of God. She takes it in the
arms of her soul, and strives to lift it nearer. “Leave hold!” cries the
tremendous voice of God; “she is too great a weight for thee.” And
Mechtild looks up and smiles. “Eia, my Lord!” she cries; “I will carry
her to Thy feet with Thine own arms that Thou didst outspread upon the
cross for her!”
Such is the aim of Mechtild: to bring the over-powerful and worldly
Roman hierarchy back to the primitive and democratic ideal of
Christianity. She has the courage of her intention, and shrinks not from
rebuking error, however high its place. She, the Beguine, the sister of
the poor, wrote to the Dean of Magdeburg censuring the notoriously idle
and voluptuous lives of his clergy. “Let him sleep upon straw, and his
canons take and eat it for their fodder!” Perhaps it is not wonderful
the clergy of Magdeburg did not love the prophetess.
Also she wrote to the Pope, to Clement IV., whose tolerance of the
murder of Conradine had lost him many loyal German hearts, whose lax and
irreligious court was Gomorrah in the sight of Mechtild. And these
priests and prelates, this all-powerful Pope, if they do not reform and
obey, yet listen they humbly to the words of this unsanctioned nun, this
secular sister of Magdeburg.
Never again have the Beguines attained so fine, so pure an eminence.
They are indeed still poor, still lowly, still unrecognized, still
Beguines. But these negations are become their glory and their
distinction. Which life is nearer the ideal life of Christendom, the
life of a great prelate or the life of the Beguine? The priests hear and
listen, for the moment abashed because of their splendour and their
power. The Beguines are poor, unlettered, unprotected; but they are
nearer the simplicity of God, that _reine heilige Einfalt_ which the
Beguine Mechtild well knows how to praise.
So for thirty years Mechtild preached against error and prophesied
punishment, sang of the love of God, and saw visions of a hell where
wicked ecclesiastics burn for persecuting the innocent. For thirty years
she lived, in her beguinage, the strenuous, earnest, indignant life of
the reforming seer, the life of Dante, the life of Savonarola. And then
the vigorous frame wore out. In her fifty-third year even Mechtild saw
that an end must be put to this unrelaxed endeavour. Fain would she have
gone, like Jutta von Schönhausen, into the wild woods to preach to the
heathen Prussians. But this could not be; the body was too weak. She
retired to the Cistercian cloister of Helfta, the home of the great
Abbess Gertrude, and of her sister, the younger Mechtild. But even there
she did not rest. “What shall I do in a cloister—I?” she demanded in
agonized prayers. “Teach and enlighten,” answered a heavenly voice. And
so for twelve years longer Mechtild lives, and teaches the cloister of
the great world beyond its walls, and finishes her book on the flowing
light of Godhead, till, honoured and loved by all, she ends her eventful
life in the year 1277.
VII.
_Reine, Heilige Einfalt_; such is the phrase in which Mechtild praised
her God. _Pure, holy simplicity_; it is the praise of the Beguines and
the Mystics, the beginning of pantheism. But Mechtild is no pantheist;
she strenuously believes in the personality of the soul, the reality of
Christ, the existence of the world, and in heaven and in hell. She is an
orthodox and Catholic Christian; yet she is stirred by the spirit of her
time.
“God,” she says, “is pure simplicity; out of the eternal spring of Deity
I flowed, and all things flow, and thence shall all return.” These
earnest phrases of mystical pantheism escape her lips, though they do
not touch her heart. She does not consider all that they imply; for if
all things, having arisen in the Deity, flow back to their source when
life is over, how can Evil have a real existence, how can sinners be
punished for ever in the city of Eternal Hate? If God be the one thing
real, there is no evil and there is no hell. If all souls released from
existence return to that pure and holy simplicity, there is no personal
immortality either for bliss or for bale. Mechtild did not perceive the
bearings and the consequences of her phrase; but the Beguines pushed the
meaning to its term. The pantheism of Alexandria, the pantheism of the
suppressed Almarician heresy, stirred and quickened in the thoughts of
pious and schismatic Beguinism. And pantheism, with its two extremes of
austerity and sensualism, increased and deepened in the sect.
Mystical pantheism, which asserts that God is all and matter nothing;
the spirit all, the body but a transitory veil; thought and mind
eternal, sense and sensuous pleasure of no account for evil or for good;
this doctrine is capable of two interpretations. It may be the religion
of Plotinus and pure souls. It may absolutely ignore the body; it may
mean the life of the mind and the soul carried always to the highest
possible pitch. Or it may be, and too often is, the excuse of the basest
sensualism. There is a page of psychology in the changed meaning of the
word Libertine. Since, neither for sin nor for sanctity, the body can
affect the soul, since sensuous pleasures are quite independent of the
spiritual existence, the lower pantheism may excuse debauch as a
permissible relaxation not affecting the spirit. And this is what it
generally does come to mean among communities of undisciplined and
ill-educated enthusiasts.
This is gradually what it came to mean among the Beghards and the
Beguines, or at least among a large proportion of them. Some, indeed,
praying to the Pure and Holy Simplicity, endeavoured to live only in the
pureness of their souls, and thus to become one with that inspiring
spirit. Such were the Beguines of Strasburg. And a section of the
secular communities, dreading these continual inroads of heresy,
entrenched themselves in Catholic orthodoxy, and enlisted in the third
orders of Dominic and Francis. But the great remainder was absorbed by a
vague mystical pantheism, which, placing the soul too high to be
affected by the matters of the flesh, made this opinion an excuse for a
complete independence of the moral law.
Towards the close of the life of Mechtild the prestige of Beguinism had
seriously declined. Innocent IV. and Urban IV. had taken the secular
order under their peculiar protection, but in 1274, Pope Gregory X.
renewed against it the sentence of the Lateran Council and declared the
Beguines unrecognized by Rome. Following this official condemnation, the
blame of lesser men came thick and fast; and by the end of the
thirteenth century the secular fraternities were popular only among the
poor, only among the laymen and the people. They were discredited and
heretic among the clergy.
For thirty years before the sentence of Gregory complaints of the
Beguines and the Beghards had been sent to Rome from the prelates of
Germany and Flanders. The two demons foreseen by Mechtild, the demon of
vainglory and the demon of sensual sin, had entered in among these quiet
homes of prayer. Already in 1244 there were scandals among the younger
sisters, and the Archbishop of Mayence decreed that the beguinages of
his diocese should receive no women under forty years of age. Already in
1250 Albertus Magnus at Cologne had met with heretic Beghards, men whose
vague pantheism was to grow and spread among the order, until all
distinction should be lost between the Beghards and the heretic Brothers
of the Free Spirit. Already they had returned to their old habits,
wandering through the streets, ragged as an Eastern fakir, praying aloud
and begging of the passers-by: “Bread, for the sake of God!” Too much
ignorance with too much liberty had gone far to destroy and pervert the
real uses of the order. The great moment of Beguinism, its time of
independent poverty and secular piety, the time of Mechtild of
Magdeburg, was past and gone. The third stage of vagabondage and heresy
had begun.
That period, we must remember, was one which, in the Church itself, was
a period of corruption and of schism. There is no charge brought against
the secular order, which might not equally be brought against the
regular monks and nuns. The long wave of pantheism which preceded the
Reformation engulfed the ignorant Beguines in a hundred perversions of
an idea ill explained, misunderstood; but that same wave overwhelmed
Master Eckhart and the Dominican Mystics. Only the Roman Church, jealous
of the unrecognized order, was swift to hear the low voice of the
Beguines murmuring, “_God is all that exists._”
This one phrase caught, repeated, whispered, half understood,
misunderstood, often not understood at all, spread with the swiftness
and authority of gospel among the Beghards and the Beguines of Europe.
Soon in Italy, the vagrant sect of Apostolici, the followers of
Segarelli, and the Franciscan Fraticelli in France, and the Beghards and
Beguines of Northern Europe, all were murmuring together that one
phrase, that key-word of pantheism, “_Deus est formaliter omne._”
It is not easy to prevent the growth of an idea among a community so
widely spread, so constantly changing. Segarelli was burned at Parma all
in vain. His doctrines had percolated everywhere. Inspired by the
example of the mendicant orders, many of the Beghards and Beguines had
returned to the vagabond life. Pious vagrants all in rags, staffless,
scripless, they wandered through the country from beguinage to
beguinage, begging for their food along the way. It was a change indeed
from the early habits of the order, so busy, so hard at work, so pious,
so responsible. But in the hearts of the lowest classes the secular
fraternities were never so dear, never so much revered as now. In 1295
the Council of Mayence forbad them to wander through the streets,
exciting public pity and crying, “_Brod durch Got!_” and Guillaume de
St. Amour lamented that the people were blinded by the rags, the hunger,
the false piety of these vagrants. This, of course, is the view of
churchmen who did not entertain such strict opinions with regard to the
merit of Franciscan mendicants. Indeed, much of the ill-favour with
which the Church regarded the wandering Beghards and Beguines of these
later days may be set down to a jealousy lest the piety of these
irregular brothers should defraud the begging orders of their due. From
one cause or another the thunders of the Church began to fall heavy and
frequent upon the secular fraternities.
In 1310 the Council of Treves disposed of the pretensions of the
Beghards in what appeared a sufficiently decisive manner. The Beghards
were called an imaginary congregation, idle fugitives from honest
labour, false interpreters of Scripture, mendicant vagabonds
unsanctioned by the Church.
In 1311, at the Council of Vienna, Clement V. decreed the total
suppression of Beguinism. But the sentence was severe. Too many innocent
must suffer with the guilty. In the same year the Pope revoked his
sentence, and allowed the orthodox and irreproachable among the Beguines
to live “according to the inspiration of the Lord.”
But from this time Beguinism as an institution was at an end. The
“orthodox and irreproachable” were Beghards and Beguines who had joined
the Tertiary Order of Francis or of Dominic. The secular order was no
longer secular; the aim of the Beguines was falsified and changed.
VIII.
In the year 1328 nearly fifty Libertines or Brothers of the Free Spirit
were publicly burned at Cologne.
The persecution of the wandering Beguines and Beghards had thoroughly
begun. In the history of the time, in the chronicles of any town along
the Rhine or in the Low Countries, we may meet the dolorous little
entry: On such a day so many Beghards were burned or imprisoned in
perpetual _In pace_. A special German Inquisition was instituted against
them.
It is the old cruel war of intolerance and heresy, the vain and shameful
struggle with which six centuries are full. But there was here a more
than usual excuse for the excessive severity of Rome. Europe was fast
being ruined by these mendicant wanderers. Begging friars of St.
Francis, Carmelites, Dominicans, numerous new orders which flourished
for a while, and died, and are forgotten, all these flooded the country
with pious vagrants for whom the impoverished laymen must provide. And
in addition to all these orthodox idlers, there was now a countless
horde of wandering Beghards, no less ignorant, no less incapable of
warfare or of labour, and, in addition, pestilent heretics. Such was the
view of the Church.
Fifty years before, Gregory X. had tried to reduce “the unbridled throng
of mendicants, who are a heavy burden alike on Church and people;” but
his efforts had been in vain. The poor of every nation and of every time
are quick to ascribe piety to those who, ragged and homeless, assert
that the life to come shall repay them for their sufferings here. Half
starved, down-trodden, little better than slaves, the peasants of
Germany would share their squalid meal thankfully with the wandering
friar. It was little less than sacrilege to refuse a portion to the holy
man. This was the natural attitude of the people. They gave, and did not
complain.
They gave, and the friars took, and the Beghards took, and still the cry
was “Give.” The Fratricelli, Apostolici, Beghards, Beguines, Brothers of
the Free Spirit, overran the whole of Europe. These all must be fed no
less than the orthodox fraternities. And year by year the number of the
mendicants increased. The careless wandering life without responsibility
or consequence, the absence of ties or of toil, the prestige in
idleness, attracted the vagabond and lazy. And many of the pious really
believed it the noblest human life. Since the idea of Divinity was
simplicity, mere simplicity, then the more the saint was simplified and
the less heed he took for apparel or for food the nearer he was to
heaven. These men and women, strange descendants of the spinning sisters
and the Fratres Textores, were like the lilies of the field inasmuch as
they toiled not, neither did they spin. They thus fulfilled the popular
ideal of piety. Year by year labour and forethought grew more
discredited, as it was discovered that, if you did not feed yourself, a
more worldly person would always feed you; until in 1317 we read in the
sentences collected by Johann von Ochsenstein that no exterior motive,
_not even the desire of the kingdom of heaven, should tempt a good man
towards activity_.
It was in vain for even the Pope to preach, for Guillaume de St. Amour
to attack all mendicants alike, for councils and bishops to thunder
against the indolence, the mendicancy, the lax morals and loose opinions
of these men. The mendicants grew more and more. The nations groaned
under the holy burden. Then, about 1310, unable to contain her
displeasure any longer, the Church bursts forth into interdicts and
persecution. Fifty Beghards are burned at Cologne. At Magdeburg some
Beguines are cast into prison. At Strasburg, at Constance, at Mayence,
the Beguines and Beghards are punished unless converted within three
days. It is war to the knife against the wandering heretics.
IX.
Under the pressure of a displeasure so severe, the greater number of the
Beghards and Beguines accepted the rule of the tertiary orders. The
mother became submissive to her children. The larger party of the
fraternity, including all the Flemish beguinages, accepted the
Franciscan rule; but the Beghards and Beguines of Strasburg, the most
suspected of any, joined the Tertiary Order of Dominic. Thus the heresy
of Beguinism appeared for a while overcome.
But at the same time a strange mystical pantheistic tendency became
noticeable in many sermons and lessons of the Church herself. All this
multitude of heretic Beguines, suddenly made orthodox within three days,
all this vast accession of vague Almarician piety was not without an
influence on the conquering faith. Among the Dominicans of Strasburg the
mystical bent grew more decided year by year. These much-admired doctors
and magisters were lights of the Church, men of influence and learning;
but the mysticism which was orthodox in them was really identical with
the neoplatonist theories of the Beghards. And, indeed, these
men,—Eckhart, Tauler, Rulmann Merswin—went further in the way of
pantheism than the heretic brotherhood had gone before.
It is impossible to exterminate an idea. It must live its course, grow,
flourish, and die. Be it wise or foolish, orthodox or heterodox, let it
but have some new aspect of truth in it; let it but be fresh, profound,
and striking; let it be truly and verily an idea: it will live its life
before it dies its natural death.
Thus the idea of the Beguines, arbitrarily suppressed, yet flourished
only the more. Like a brier budded on a rose tree, it brought out its
wild and fragile blossoms among the ordered beauties of the
ecclesiastical garden. In the great Dominican mystics of Strasburg the
central thought of heretic Beguinism (“_Deus est omnia_”) flourished
more completely than before.
God is all: the world is nothing. This is what the mystics of Strasburg
and the mystics of the Netherlands now began to preach to the world.
X.