Читать книгу The End of the Middle Ages - A. Mary F. Robinson - Страница 22

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Meanwhile Mechtild, a mystic by doctrine and circumstance, but not by temperament, concerned herself, even in the convent, chiefly with the affairs of reality. She was, as we have seen, every one’s friend, nurse, and confidant, and but slenderly concerned with saintly glories for herself. She never wrought any miracles, nor did God ever tell her that she was His most favoured among women. It was Gertrude’s glory that she declared. The saintly acts that are recorded of her have a pathetic human grotesqueness never to be found in Gertrude’s doings or sayings. For instance, out of a great pity for the sins of the mummers and dancers at carnival, she filled her bed full of potsherds and broken glass, and rolled in them till she was a mass of cuts and sores, begging God to accept her suffering as a set-off to the merry-making of the world outside. This is not the true mystical temper, which ignores all but the union of the soul with God. Mechtild sought no advancement for her own soul, she sought to palliate the offences of the guilty and to save them from punishment rather than bring them to repentance; moreover she felt herself responsible for their errors. The true ecstatic, lost in God, abjures human responsibility. Nevertheless, even in the convent, Mechtild, with her merry patience in suffering, her care for the sick body no less than the sick soul, her humility and lovingness, was naturally dearer than her austere, abstracted sister-saint. And, none the less, the sisterhood was aware that Gertrude not Mechtild was their real title to honour.

As the mystical life spread like a contagion through the convent, many of the younger sisters, underfed, deprived of air and exercise, had not strength to support the abnormal existence of the visionary. Sickness was frequent in this convent of ecstatics, and whether at Rodardesdorf or at Helfta its mortality was excessive. The nuns died young of undefined diseases. We are always meeting allusions to their short, dream-visited lives, to their early and inexplicable dying. They perish of anæmia, before the acknowledgedly consumptive sisters; and the nuns can find no reason for their death unless it be that God was anxious to remove so much sweetness to flourish perpetually in His presence. The diseases of the convent are such physical ills as are induced by mental strain and by bodily inanition—consumption, hysteric convulsions, or paralysis, disturbances of the liver. Such as cannot die—such as, like Gertrude herself, have too strong a fibre to perish in girlhood—linger, tormented by sickness, prematurely old and useless. All they have to console them is the phrase, vouchsafed by her heavenly bridegroom to Gertrude in vision, “Lo! ye that fain would hasten into my presence, ye are as a spouse that bare and unadorned would venture into the nuptial chamber; know, that after this death which ye so much desire, no further grace can accrue to the soul, nor can it suffer any more for God’s sake.”

Mechtild of Magdeburg, Dante’s Matilda, was the first of the greater saints to succumb. A long life of hardship, of energetic striving with a guilty world, years of Beguine Prophecy, much labour of writing and preaching, and the pain of bodily weariness, had worn her out. At the age of sixty-seven the strongest and sweetest of all the German women-mystics departed from a world which she had not shrunk to face, which even from her cloister she had striven to ennoble. The strong, reforming spirit was stilled at last. The one woman in the convent of Helfta who knew the world as it is, its sins and aspirations, its generosities and crimes, was dead. A window was shut in that house, a window showing the world beyond the chapel walls, and letting in upon the heavy smell of flickering candles and swinging censers the free breath of the wind. Henceforth there was no reminder of the larger world, the purer air outside: Mechtild of Magdeburg was dead.