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[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[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.
[1]. The principal sources for this and the two following articles are as follows:—Mosheim, “Institutiones Historiæ Ecclesiasticæ;” Dr. Schmidt’s “Strasburger Beginen-häuser im[im] Mittelalter” and other pages by this master of mediæval religious thought; Dr. Preger’s “Geschichte[Geschichte] der deutschen Mystik im Mittelalter;” the volume on “Le Panthéisme populaire au Moyen Age” of M. Auguste Jundt; Stockl’s “Geschichte der Philosophie: Meister Eckhardt;” the writings on the School of Alexandria of M. Vacherot and M. Barthélemy Saint Hilaire; Mr. Vaughan’s “Half-Hours with the Mystics;” and last, not least, the sermons of Eckhardt, the poems of Mechtild of Magdeburg, and the meditations and lives of Saint Gertrude and Saint Mechtild of Helfta.