preacher, was living in Strasburg. His deep and original mind, which so
vastly was to influence the speculation of his time, was now itself
brought under the influence of Beguinism. From 1312 to 1317 he preached
and visited in the Dominican beguinages of Strasburg. Always a mystic
and a neoplatonist, before that date he was not suspected of heresy. The
theories of the Dominican Beguines agreed perfectly with the convictions
of this singular being, who preached in accents of strenuous sincerity
the doctrine of the unreality of matter.
Among the Beguines of his diocese was one whom Eckhart adopted to be his
spiritual daughter. But the relation of the Beguine Sister Katrei to the
great Vicar-general of the Dominican order was scarcely that attitude of
submission which we expect from a penitent to her confessor. She leads
him on to new audacities of faith, suggests new penances, refuses all
restraint. She shows him how an earnest nature can reduce to practice
his special tenet that the world is nothing, that God alone exists.
Katrei was the daughter of worthy Strasburg townspeople. Not necessity,
but an enthusiasm for self-humiliation drove her to the beguinage. Ever
in doubt of her own salvation, she multiplied her fasts and penances
till even her director beseeched her to take some pity on her starved
and shattered body. But Katrei would not be persuaded; not yet, she
declared, was the old Adam slain in her; not yet was she “dead all
through.” As Mechtild of Magdeburg is the great active type of the
order, so Katrei represents the passive Beguinism. She had no reforming
zeal; she belonged to the later school, to those who said: “Not even the
desire of the kingdom of heaven must tempt a good man towards activity.”
To free herself from the world and the claims of the world, to leave
behind the flesh and all the needs and desires of the flesh, this was
the overmastering preoccupation of Swester Katrei. She left the
sheltering beguinage, the faces too familiar to be easily forgotten, the
neighbourhood of father and of mother, and set out alone upon the
wandering Beguine’s life. With her she took neither staff nor scrip.
“All that I ask of the world,” she said, “is a spring, a crust, and a
garment” (_brunnen, brod, und ein rock_). So for many months she went,
absorbed in her own soul, forgetting men and women, earthly pleasure,
earthly love, and earthly duty, and at last returned to Strasburg to be
known by no one there.
She was not yet satisfied. Her ideal was not yet reached. “Not yet,” she
persisted, “am I dead all through.” “Nay,” answered the confessor
(behind whose cowl we see the face of Eckhart), “not so long as thou
rememberest who was thy father and who thy mother; not so long as thou
shalt care if thy priest refused to confess thee or absolve thee; not so
long as it shall disturb thee if thou mayest not taste the body of God;
not so long as thou shalt grieve when none will shelter thee, and all
despise thee; not until then, my sister, canst thou know the real death
unto self.” Then again, Katrei retired into the wilderness, and for a
long time she wandered to and fro across the face of the earth. When she
returned she was strangely changed; even her confessor did not know her.
At last, her cataleptic trances growing daily longer and more profound,
she being permanently raised into a strange hysteric insensibility to
pain or hunger, she lay the whole day long without food or drink or
movement in a corner of the great cathedral. Now she was dead to outer
things. “Now,” she said, “I am God.” Her father and her mother came and
cried to her, half abashed at her holiness, half agonized at her
condition. But Katrei did not know them now. She no longer recognized
what she looked upon; the world and all within it was a blank to her.
At last, one day, the trance deepened; she ceased to breathe. Some
people of the church, thinking her dead, took her away to bury her. But
when they returned to the church with Katrei on the bier, her confessor,
approaching, perceived she was not really dead. “Art thou satisfied?” he
demanded; and she answered, “I am satisfied at last.” She would have let
them bury her.
Quietism can go no further than this. When this singular woman died,
between 1312 and 1320, though the Church already began to censure the
mystical errors of Beguinism, yet her piety was deemed so great that
Meister Eckhart wrote a memoir of her life as an example and an
exhortation to the pious. She is the saint of the later Beguinism, even
as the vigorous Mechtild of Magdeburg is the patron of the older style.
XI.
But sister Katrei had too many followers, and gradually the sense of the
religious world revolted from this numb and dead ideal. Already, in the
writings of Suso (1335), of Ruysbrock, and Rulmann Merswin, men whose
idealist mysticism was little different from the Beguine heresy, the
quietism of these “false freemen” is utterly condemned. Suso, in his
Book of Truth, recounts how he met on a journey one of these wandering
Beghards, who, to all his questions, responded much as Parsifal responds
to Gurnemanz. Whence he came and whither going, the wanderer does not
know. He is called the Nameless Savage. He is Nothing abysmed in the
Divine Nothingness. Without will or desire he obeys his natural
instincts, since any conflict with them would destroy the quiet of his
soul. Such is the latest type of the secular brotherhood; but this,
unlike Sister Katrei, meets no approval from the marvelling Church.
Indeed, the Beghards and the Beguines, with their lax morals, their
mendicant insolence, had become an insupportable burden. So, in despair,
in 1328 the Church, as we have said, delivered fifty of them to the
secular arm, and these were burned, as an example, in Cologne. The
persecution was now steadfast and continuous; but still in secret
places, and by strange underground channels, the pantheist idea spread
on unseen—pantheism which now was no longer vague and veiled. “_We do
not believe in God, and we do not love Him, and we do not adore Him, and
we do not hope in Him, for this would be to avow that He is other than
ourselves._” Thus speak these heretics of the fourteenth century. So far
have they pushed the phrase, God is all that exists.
From this time the cohesive force of Beguinism rapidly diminishes. In
1365 Pope Urban V. still speaks of the “children of Belial, Beghards and
Beguines,” but their name slips gradually out of the chronicles of
edicts and of councils. Or it is applied to any new sect of heretics. In
1373 we hear of “the Beghards or Turlupins,” and in the next century
Beghard is frequently synonymous with Lollard. The great heresy of the
Free Spirit was divided into a hundred unimportant divisions. By the
middle of the fifteenth century, the Beghards and Beguines were either
orthodox communities of some tertiary order, or scattered hermits,
living in woods and forests, and stealthily keeping red the few embers
left of pantheistic heresy. It seemed as if the movement were really
stamped out. But the phrase of Mechtild was not so easily confuted. No
man can burn an idea.
We hear no more, it is true, of the Beguines or of the Weaving Brothers;
but in the sixteenth century, when at Wittenberg and at Strasburg, at
Basle and at Meaux, the great idea of the Reformation simultaneously
awoke, in that period of spiritual ferment, the pantheism of the secular
fraternities flamed out again, and more fiercely than before. The
libertines, the anabaptists, and familists of the sixteenth century
preserved in a coarser form the persecuted tradition of the Beghards and
the Beguines.
THE CONVENT OF HELFTA.
The great ideals of the world save themselves by strange disguises.
Though the advance of progress threaten their existence, none the less
they perpetuate themselves in unsuspected shelter. If to-day we see
religion mask itself as devotion to humanity, it is but the reversal of
the great masquerade of the Middle Ages, when whatever impulse of
good-will to man was destined to survive assumed for safety’s sake the
garb of the Church. Benevolence, science, logic, philosophy, and all the
arts put on the hood and cowl. And the time came when love also entered
religion. Indeed, the convent was the one safe place of refuge in a
struggling, dark, chaotic world—a world for which centuries of careful
nurture had ill-fitted the sentiment of love. The Middle Ages had
existed, one might say, for its development. During the century
succeeding the invention of the Immaculate Conception (1134), the cultus
of the Virgin became dominant in the Church, and, _pari passu_, the
position of women grew nobler in the world—was, indeed, elevated and
spiritualized to a dangerous artificial beauty. Then a thousand devices
were discovered to hide from the yet imperfect man and woman the
brutality of the one and the meanness of the other. The Courts of Love,
where no husband might be the lover of his wife, the gross and strained
devotion of the minnesingers, the worship of Mary and the saints, were
expedients unreal or ugly in themselves, but they imposed on mere
brutish passion a beautiful sentiment of reverence and service. For they
showed the woman beloved as a creature aloof and apart, separated from
the disenchantment of possession by the distance of heaven or the
barriers of earth.
Thus through the Middle Ages love grew and flourished; a plant delicate
yet and scarcely acclimatised, but watered and tendered and sheltered.
Without this care it could not grow, being still young and not
well-rooted. Then in the thirteenth century a terrible convulsion
disturbed the world, and the fate of all tender, exquisite things hung
for a while in awful balance. For in that eventful century, which rounds
the old world and begins the new, the long-gathering jealousy of pope
and emperor burst into a fearful storm. The tempest of over twenty years
which destroyed the empire of the house of Hohenstaufen left Rome,
though victorious, none the less a prey to her own champion, Charles of
Anjou. For three years he would not suffer the election of a pope,
holding the keys of Peter in his unrelaxing clutches; and even when the
papal see was nominally filled, the Angevine adventurer guided its
counsels and prompted its decrees. One shipwreck engulfed both papacy
and empire, nor could any foresee that from those wrecks far nobler
vessels should be built. The hierarchic and feudal order of things had
fallen, and the spirit of law and federation was yet unknown. All over
Europe spread darkness and confusion: Rome was paralysed, France crazed
with superstition and communistic panic, Italy a mere disorganised prey
for the next comer; and Germany, most piteous of all, with the convert’s
earnestness and the loyalty of a serf, not yet fit for the sudden
withdrawal of the hierarchy and the feudalism to which she clung for
support, Germany reeled heavily. It seemed that the end of the world was
at hand; and truly, in this terrible interregnum, the whole fabric of
the Middle Ages began to crack and gape in ominous ruin.
Now that the Courts of Love were wasted, his tournaments battle-fields,
his minstrels shouting battle-cries, what had become of Love? Where
should his ladies, sung so long and honoured, look for their knights?
They are gone to fight for God and the king; they are gone far away, but
no longer to the Holy Sepulchre; they are gone to ravage and ruin
distant cities, or to lay low the power of Rome. Many never return; some
after years—ten, fifteen, twenty years—come home again, tanned and
grey—swearing troopers, whose talk is all of battle, whose camp jests
and lewd stories fall like filth into the pure fountain of a woman’s
soul. What knight is this for a delicate lady to love! She must change
the very nature of her love if this shall satisfy her heart. The frail
ideal, nourished so long with care and patience, must die, so it seems.
But, as in ancient legends, where the lustful lover pursues a pure
nymph, gaining hold upon her, stretching out his hands for the prize, to
find them empty, to find her out of reach, safe in the inviolable
greenness of the laurel, even so the tender spirit of love, with one
violent effort, set itself beyond the lusts of the imbruted world,
sheltered, transformed into the mystical love of God.
A natural impulse was given to religion by the divisions and disasters
of society. We have shown by what channels the mystical spirit of
Alexandria permeated the religion of the West. The knight from his
captors or his captives, the scholar from his studies, the monk from his
perusal of the most popular of saintly authors, might all become imbued
with a like spirit. Throughout the West there spread, partially, indeed,
and not to all alike, a scorn of science and understanding, and a sense
of mystery, an aspiration to ecstasy, a desire to merge all personality
in the infinite. Such influences did not create, they did but direct the
movement. They were—as M. Vacherot has shown us—a source of inspiration,
a reserve of tradition for a natural instinct which, even without them,
must have satisfied itself. Owing partly to these semi-religious
influences, partly to the external condition of affairs, the
movement—which might have established another School of Alexandria,
might have believed in astrology or the philosopher’s stone, might have
merely ended in jugglery and witchcraft—instead of this became a school
for visionaries and ecstatics. How strong the movement was may be
inferred by the length of its duration, and by our finding in its ranks
not merely hysteric virgin saints, not merely the two priors of St.
Victor, not merely the poetic Suso, the fervid Ruysbrock, the
contemplative Tauler, but the wide intellect of Albertus Magnus, the
strength of Eckhart, the practical wisdom of Gerson.
The doctrines of Neoplatonism, received through the medium of a saint,
were translated into another sense by men of less intellect and stronger
affections than the Alexandrines. Science is little to these later
mystics, the inward spring of peace is much; they question with
Bonaventura not doctrine but desire, not the human mind but heavenly
grace. Not light they ask, but fire. By ecstasy they seek to unite
themselves not only with the abstract wisdom, but with a supreme love.
For ecstasy is to them the _ars amandi_, and to them the one thing
needful not intelligence, but feeling. “Amor oculus est,” says Richard
of Saint Victor, “et amare videre est.” To behold with this eye the
things that are hidden from earthly vision; to die to the world, in
order to live to Christ; to lose one’s soul; to drown self, conscience,
reason, virtue, feeling, in a flood of ecstasy, this had become the
ambition of the nobler spirits of the world.
In this apotheosis of ecstasy, this contagion of love, the feminine
element naturally predominated. The movement, which the gracious and
pathetic figure of Elizabeth of Hungary announced, was to be, above all,
a movement of women. Far beyond the glory of Eckhart and Gerson, above
the eminence of thinker and teacher, shone, in this strange hierarchy of
dreamers, the beatitude of the visionary and prophetess. Prophets of God
some, others prophets of evil; so the Church decided. But it is hard to
divide the spiritual abnegation of Bridget, of Catherine, of the two
German Elizabeths, of Mechtild of Magdeburg, Gertrude and Mechtild von
Hackeborn, from the heresy which declared that to the soul lost in God
the sins of the body are as naught. That heresy is but the others’
holiness, pushed to its logical consequence.
The saints were chiefly women—women of vague, imperious, unsatisfied
emotion, sick of a world given over to rapine, interdict, and slaughter,
where no choice was left between disloyalty and damnation; women young
and active, living for the most part the passive, temperate eventless
life of the convent; women who imposed on themselves long fasts and
vigils, whose tender flesh was bruised with the stone flags of the cell
where they would lie of winter nights for penance, and torn with the
lashings of the self-inflicted scourge. In this life no hope for them;
in this world no love, no happiness, no possessions. As starving people
dream of delicious feasts and banquets, they found in a vision the
things withheld from them awake.
_Amor rapit, unit, satisfacit_: the practical Gerson lets fall the fiery
phrase. Each of these virgin visionaries had said as much. Open the
books of their exercises, their revelations; the dusty pages exhale a
violence and tenderness of passion that the minnesingers never caught,
the troubadors never felt, in their earthly singing. For these saintly
visions are all of love—love which ravishes; nay, love which drowns,
annihilates, swallows up. Love in a dream, and yet the one real thing in
a cramped and narrow life; love which fills every interstice and cranny
of a void and aching heart; love unseen, untouched, unheard, for which
the visionary waits hour by hour, in an anguish of tense devotion, waits
till the muttered monotony of her prayers, the fixed, unvaried straining
of her eyes, shall have lulled the body to a death-like trance, shall
set free the soul to show her the mirage of her own unsatisfied desire.
I.
Throughout the thirteenth century Thuringia continued the centre and
stronghold of German sanctity. The life of St. Elizabeth at the Wartburg
had gone up from its midst like a purifying altar-flame to heaven. When
she died in 1231, hundreds of men and women came in tears to honour the
wasted body wrapped in its worn Franciscan cloak, lying dead in the poor
little house at Marburg. From the memory of her life, from the
pilgrimages to her tomb, a tradition and ideal of saintliness spread
among the people. Fifteen years later, it was in Thuringia that the Pope
found his champion. Even his oppression, and the defeat and death of
that ill-starred defender of the faith did little to abate the popular
ardour.
The convent of Rodardesdorf, near Eisleben, and the great princely
convent of Quedlinburg, gave an especial religious distinction to
Thuringia; but not until about the year 1234, when the rich and noble
Freiherr von Hackeborn of Helfta placed at Rodardesdorf his little
five-year-old daughter Gertrude, was the specially illustrious future of
that house decided. Rodardesdorf was a convent of Cistercians, a
thoughtful and peaceful place. The little Gertrude was happy there. She
was a serious and earnest child, “not content,” says the chronicle,
“with childish innocence, but, even when a babe, gifted with a constant
gravity and prudence of demeanour.” Indeed, that childish head was
troubled with many things, for the little girl was passionately eager to
learn all that came in her way: science, liberal arts, grammar,
theology. So that she became no less honoured for her acquirements than
beloved for her docility and modesty of bearing.
But the convent was to acquire another infant saint. The mother of
Gertrude again visited the convent, and on one occasion brought with her
her younger daughter, Mechtild, then seven years of age, and as many
years younger than her sister. “They came for honest diversion,” says
the chronicle, probably to see little Gertrude, and certainly with no
thought of leaving Mechtild behind. But the child was so delighted with
the strange place, the large rooms, the little cells, the chapel with
its altar lights, the children in the garden, the nuns who made much of
her, that she declared she would willingly remain there for ever. Nor
would she leave, though her mother bade her come. Then the sisters,
delighted with so much holiness so young, instantly beseeched the mother
to leave her little girl in their company for awhile, and to this she
consented. Poor mother, did no pang go through her heart when the
convent doors shut on both her children? It was for ever; no prayers, no
commands could bring her back her wilful, loving, eager little Mechtild
any more, for the _Vita_ relates, “after this holy and blessed embrace
her parents could never withdraw her from that place for all the
caresses and endearments that they knew how to make.” With bruised ties
and bleeding hearts the career of saintliness begins. “Only he,” runs
the Scripture that child would often hear, “that hateth father and
mother can become my disciple.”
Of the daily routine of life in the convent we may gain an idea from
Abelard’s directions to the nuns of the Paraclete, and, setting against
the difference of date the difference of culture in the two countries,
we may not unfairly suppose the Thuringian Cistercians of 1250 to have
followed much the same rule of life as the Benedictines of Heloise
adopted a century earlier.
According to the code of Abelard the convent was divided into six
functions, all alike subject to the direction of the abbess. The
sacristan was responsible for the convent treasury; she kept the keys,
and had the care of the church plate and sacred vessels; and it was her
duty to set the virgin sisters to prepare the wafers for the Host, which
must not be made by widows. The chantress taught singing and reading,
had care of the choir and of the library, to which she was expected to
add by copying and illuminating manuscripts. The head of the infirmary
had charge of the sick. Another sister was mistress of the wardrobe, and
responsible not only for all the spinning, weaving, and sewing necessary
for the convent, but also for the tanning and cobbling. The cellarer had
in her charge the wines for the altar and the sick, the provisioning of
the table, and the management of whatever the convent possessed in
orchards and garden-land, flocks and herds and hives, trout streams and
mills. Lastly, the doorkeeper, who was especially chosen for courteous
manners, judgment, and trustworthiness, was responsible for the keeping
of the gate, the entertainment of guests, and the distribution of
hospitality.
Life in the convent was not hard, but monotonous, eventless beyond
description—a perpetual alternation of broken sleep, repeated tasks, and
prayer. In the middle of the night the sisters rose for Matins, and the
office over, trooped back through the darkness to the dormitory. There
they slept till Lauds, which are sung at the break of day; in summer,
when Lauds are early, the sisters slept again till Prime. At Prime they
left the dormitory, having first washed their hands, and taking their
books repaired to the cloister to read and sing until the office should
begin. Service over, they all assembled in the chapter-house, where a
lesson out of the Martyrology was read to them and expounded. On leaving
the chapter each nun was sent to fulfil her allotted task—singing or
sewing, nursing or baking—until the hour of Tierce, when mass was said.
They then resumed their work till noon, the sixth hour, which was the
convent dinner-time, except on fast-days, when it was postponed till
Nones, or in Lent, when nothing was eaten till after Vespers at four.
The convent fare was simple and spare. Save for the sick, no wine; stale
bread of coarse flour; roots and greens, and at discretion of the abbess
a portion of unflavoured meat on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. From
the autumn equinox till Easter, on account of the shortness of the days,
this one meal was considered sufficient for all save the infirm.
After dinner, in summer-time, the sisters slept till Nones; in the two
hours between that office and Vespers they were set to finish their
task, but at four the day’s work was done. Between the spring and autumn
equinoxes the sisters were permitted a light refreshment after Vespers.
It was the only time when fruit might be eaten. This light supper over,
Compline began. Then they all sought the dormitory again. On Saturday
evenings they were a little later, as then the sisters were enjoined to
purify themselves—that is to say, to wash their hands and feet, a
function which the abbess or lay-sisters were specially directed to
supervise. This done, they slept till the midnight matin-bell should
clang them from their beds.