Читать книгу The End of the Middle Ages - A. Mary F. Robinson - Страница 16

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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.