Читать книгу The End of the Middle Ages - A. Mary F. Robinson - Страница 10

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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.