So far all was right and fair. Each child naturally selected the education fitted to its wants, and became wise or loving as the need was. But when they came to full girlhood they did not quit this school whose teaching they had outgrown. These girls were, since their childhood, cloistered nuns dedicated to God. But only when their childhood was over could they appreciate the meaning of their vow. To Mechtild it did not greatly matter; her life in the world might have been fuller and richer, in the convent it was not wasted. She was so easily interested in others, so gifted to soothe the sick and suffering, so naturally humble and unselfish, that even the consciousness of sanctity could not injure her nature; in her visions, even, she rarely announces her own glory. It is Gertrude that she sees in the bosom of the Father, and she hears the Divine Voice proclaim, “Gertrude is far greater than this Mechtild.” More often her visions are messages of consolation to those she has pitied and laboured for awake. She sees the dead baby of a certain sorrowing mother clad in scarlet and gold, and greatly glorified in heaven. She beholds God and the Virgin standing by the bed of one of the sisters who is sick unto death; or else her visions are tender and poetic fancies. She sees the Father giving all the saints to drink of the Fountain of Mercy. She sees the Heart of God burning like a lamp; or, again, she beholds the sacred rose that blooms in the Heart of God; or, lastly, her visions supply the needs of her maimed and stinted life. Kneeling on the floor of her cell, this loving woman, with no natural ties, often sees God come to her as a little child of five years old, and, in a dream, God gives her His love, at last, to be her mother, “to care for her and lead her as a mother her child.” Or she dreams, this woman with her love of colour and beauty, of beautiful women in splendid raiment. Mary comes to her in a gown the colour of air, sewn all over with tiny flowers of gold, and embroidered round the neck and sleeves with the holy monogram of Jesus. Or she comes in a pale green cloak, latticed over with gold, with the head of Christ in every lattice. St. Catherine of Alexandria appears in dull crimson, covered over with gold embroidery of little wheels, fastened at the breast with a clasp of two meeting hands of gold. Christ appears young and beautiful, in rose-coloured silk, stiff with gold and jewels, “yet not to be thrown away because so heavy, but rather ennobled,” as the soul with the heavy gems of grief. Or she sees the least saint in Paradise, a youth of middle height, wonderfully lovely, most fair of face, his hair crisply curling, of a colour between green and white, clad all in green. Never, out of Meister Stefan’s pictures, were there such deep colours, such quaintly-patterned gowns and mantles, such jewels and embroideries as figure in the visions of this poor little sallow saint, asleep herself in her darned serge and yellowed linen, and always clad, by her own choice, in the worst clothes of the convent, torn and patched in all corners.
The real dangers of mysticism have little power over a soul so sweet and naïve as this. But it was otherwise with Gertrude. She was a woman of passionate intensity of imagination, of an ever-active and ambitious mind. During her childhood this had been wisely exercised in study. Had she gone then into the world life and learning would have employed it for her. Had she been a secular sister like Catherine of Siena, a wandering preacher and prophetess, like Mechtild of Magdeburg, or an avowedly learned and reforming abbess, like Heloise or Teresa, she would, perhaps, have been most useful and happiest of all. But, when she grew up, when she perceived the real aim of her cloistered life, her learning became odious to her. What had the vain lore of this world to do with the appointed spouse of Christ? “While this virgin was continuing the study of the humanities,” relates the Vita, “she became aware that this study was a region too remote from the similitude of Christ, perceiving that too hungrily she had longed after human learning, for which reason she had not until that moment disposed her heart to receive Divine illumination. She knew then (and not without passionate sighs coming from the heart) that until this time she had been deprived both of the consolations and of the illuminations of Divine wisdom, since she had remained intent on human things.”
A terrible conflict, a terrible temptation. With Gertrude’s earnest nature there could be but one end. She cut off from her the hungry and passionate love of human learning as she would have cut off a limb or plucked out an eye to enter, maimed but holy, into Paradise. With tears, and anguish, and bitter agony of prayer, she maimed her soul. But not always does the mutilated member heal. Woe to those whom nature punishes for their temerity with mortification, with numb and creeping death.
Now that Gertrude had, of her own will, shut off from herself all her former means of progress and employment, how should she spend her time? She was not, like Mechtild, by nature a sick-nurse and a confidant; she had not, like Mechtild, a beautiful voice which she could cultivate for the service of God; and to her dominant eager nature it was necessary to do something and to do it better than any one else. The one remnant of all her studies which she permitted herself was the translation of Latin prayers into German for the benefit of more ignorant sisters, and at this she would persevere the whole day long. But this oft-repeated, almost mechanical employment could not fill her mind, could open no vista to her ambition. There was, indeed, only one road that she could follow; all the circumstances of her life converged to the same vanishing point.
When she remembered, in the long vacant hours of sleeping or copying, the books she used to read, what thoughts would they naturally suggest to her? She had, we may be sure, read no books that would give her visions of the world outside—poems of Virgil the magician, or the minnesingers. To her the humanities were themselves books of theology; the writings of the fathers of the Church, a tract of St. Bonaventura’s it may be, or one of the sermons of Eckhart or of Albertus Magnus (then at the prime of their renown), certainly the works of Dionysius Areopagita. What would they have taught her, these books which she had given up to imitate the lowliness of Christ? They told her, one and all, how much more desirable was feeling than reason, ecstasy than care for others, faith than works; how far above all natural tenderness of human charity was the virtus infusa, the theological virtue, the love of God. Every hour of her life must have repeated the lesson. The eight offices of the day, the lesson from the Martyrology, which was all the food this hungry and active mind was given to fast upon; the daily task of copying prayers; the long, weary misery of being no one, in no true position. All these things must have spoken to this earnest, self-preoccupied Gertrude, who had toiled so long to make herself pleasing in the eyes of every one; and, now, knowing so well what was necessary, would she not strive in prayer for this last, dearest gift? Would she not set herself to learn this one thing needful? Most likely she had not long to pray, nor ever consciously began to learn, before the gift was granted, the science acquired, the strong mind weakened and perverted, the student an ecstatic.
III.
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.”