Читать книгу The End of the Middle Ages - A. Mary F. Robinson - Страница 19

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From that first moment of vision the fame of Gertrude grew so high and so rapidly, that when in 1251 the abbess of Rodardesdorf expired, this girl-ecstatic of nineteen was elected her successor. It is strange that the duties of her new position, the great responsibilities of so famous a convent, did not draw her from her visions; but the influence of the time was strong, and the abbess of Rodardesdorf was beset by no imperious need for reform. There was no cleansing work of righteousness to be performed in that well-ordered house of high-born mystical ladies. All that Gertrude could do was, seven years after her nomination, when the springs of Rodardesdorf dried up, to remove the convent to her own castle of Helfta, an act which naturally increased her own position in the convent, and tripled her glory of abbess, benefactress, and ecstatic. Gertrude, however, was not the only saint in Helfta. Besides her sister, the sweet, fanciful Saint Mechtild, there was Gertrude the Nun,^[3] sometimes confounded with the abbess, who in all probability wrote the concluding book of the Vita, certainly finished after St. Gertrude’s death. The two daughters of the Count of Mansfeld were also professed in the convent, and were gifted disciples of its mystical doctrines. Sophia spent her life in enriching the already valuable library of Helfta, and Elizabeth painted, probably in the chapel.

In 1265 the convent, already the high school of ecstasy in the north of Germany, received a more famous woman than any of these. This was our Mechtild of Magdeburg, whose earnest faith and flashing, passionate eloquence, whose songs inspired with a wild, strange tenderness, whose life of hardship and adventure for the love of Christ, had rendered her one of the noblest and most endearing figures of her age. She chose Helfta to be the home of her declining years, and added another glory to the convent of St. Gertrude and St. Mechtild.

Such a house, it may be supposed, did not exhaust the spiritual energies of a nature so full of force and so ambitious as that of its young abbess. Her surroundings were but an added incentive to her aspiring soul. She worked hard, it is true, aided by her sister Mechtild. Every day she visited the infirmary and saw that the sick were well and cleanly treated. She ruled her nuns with thought and care; but when the hours of leisure came, the many daily periods set apart for prayer and meditation, then her old ecstasy overpowered her with a strength and vividness the more forcible for the obstacles it had to overcome. More passionate, more personal become her revelations as she lies abandoned to trance and vision in the arms of the spiritual Lover. So strong, so hot, so fierce, so tender are the words that fall from her lips, that we cannot bear them now unmoved. Ah me! what vain and fruitless passion this dreaming love of the saint for a dream!

It was not until nine years after the bestowal of the “singular grace of divine familiarity,” says the Vita that Gertrude wrote down the description of her visions. But the visions, themselves recorded in the five books of her revelations, seem to have begun almost immediately after her renunciation of human learning. “From that time she began to hold as vile all visible and external things, and verily not without a cause, for from that time the Lord opened to her the ways of Mount Zion, a place of joy and consolation. Leaving the study of grammar, in which she was greatly instructed, she turned to theology, that is to say, Holy Scripture and the lives of the saints, using them with infinite diligence.”

And soon the saint herself began to speak from the mount, in her own language. None of the tender consolations and quaintly pictured fancies of Mechtild are here. The revelations of Gertrude manifest the ambition, the activity, the emotion of a crushed and passionate nature forced into an unnatural channel. Tragic and miserable spectacle: the strong passion, the earnest will so sorely wanted in the world outside, are spent vainly, vilely, in inducing terrible disease. The saint grows weaker as her visions increase in force; her mind, warped and broken, can bend but one way. And that way is towards inertia, madness, and annihilation. An old tale, oft-repeated, yet needed, perhaps, in these days of mesmerism and spiritual séances. An old tale, well-known to the Yogis of India, to the monks and nuns of mediæval Europe, to all who have deliberately made themselves the victims of catalepsy and hysteria. For deliberately they did it. Many of the receipts have come down to us: the absolute cessation from practical affairs, the emptiness of mind and heart; the regulated diet, neither too little nor too much; the lack of sleep; the quiet, which no joy or woe of others may disturb, when, seated or kneeling in his cell, at an hour when digestion is well over, sighing lugubriously in deep, regular sighs, the eyes are fixed on one point too high or too low for perfect comfort, the arms are to beat the breast in monotonous routine, as Gerson and other mystical doctors prescribe, until a heavy trance involves the body, until the brain becomes deranged by this appalling and stultifying monotony, and creeping death or madness end the vision.

“It happened once,” says the Vita, “that by reason of sickness, Gertrude was prevented from attending vespers; and, longing for these, and feeling sick at heart, she turned to the Lord, and said: ‘O my Master, were it not more praiseworthy that I should now be singing in the choir with my other companions and hearing the prayers and the other regular exercises than to be lying in this weakness, in which I consume in negligence so many hours?’hours?’ To which He answered: ‘Oh, dost thou believe the bridegroom holds his bride less dear, when he stayeth at home to taste the familiarity of his domestic pleasure, than when he glories to lead her forth, well adorned, before the gaze of the crowd?’ from which speech she understood that, in the divine service, the soul appears as a bride going forth; but, when heavily laden with bodily infirmities, then as a bride sleeping in the secret chamber; for the more that man is weak, shorn of all pleasures of the sense, destitute and impotent, the more is he made to delight the Lord.”

Such a theory was naturally productive of fasts and vigils, nor, if the favour of her Lord depended on the sickness of her body, could it ever have been far from this poor ailing and anæmic girl. A revolting amount of suffering is naïvely and incidentally revealed in her works of spiritual grace. Scarce a chapter but opens, “Being again sorely weak from want of sustenance,” “Lying again in bed helpless with sickness,” “Being sorely oppressed with a burning of the liver,” or with some similar avowal of the connection between her revelations and the weakness of her health. Often she piteously implores the Lord to restore her to her former soundness and well-being, but the answer is always the same. “Thy sickness is a dance and a festival for me,” responds the Celestial Spouse; nor ever is there any hope given her of a cessation to her pain. In her wandering senses the poor tormented saint dimly guessed that her spiritual gifts were dependent on the utter prostration of her body and her mind.

The spectacle of her suffering convinced the whole convent of Gertrude’s sanctity. They believed her in daily communication with their unseen Head. It was natural, therefore, that they should bring their sorrows to her and entreat her intercession, as men ask a minister to counsel the king, or a steward to remedy the carelessness of the absent master, or a favoured mistress to beg that, for her love’s sake, a piece of justice may be granted that otherwise were withheld. It was natural, also, that Gertrude should believe herself capable of guiding the will of God; natural that the strange vanity of the visionary and the hysteric should obscure the eyes of her mind, and lead her further on the road she had chosen. After visions, miracles.