It was a moment of intense spiritual exaltation, this year 1224. Close at hand in the Wartburg the seventeen-year-old Landgravine Elizabeth was exciting the wonder of her people by her pieties and sweet austerities. The bread miraculously turned into heavenly roses, the leper whom she tended transformed into the shining Christ, the stories of her visions and her scourgings would certainly be familiar to the little Mechtild. The Emperor Frederic II. was already collecting his nobles for his ill-starred and heretic crusade. On Monte Laverna, in this very year, St. Francis received the stigmata. Blanche of Castile and the child St. Louis were ruling Paris as King Arthur might have ruled his court at Camelot, by the authority of love and gentleness. At the same time the ghastly prevalence of leprosy and pestilence, of war and hideous famine, made the world as dreadful as heaven was desirable. Those who recall the condition of Eisenach, as revealed by the life of St. Elizabeth, may imagine the sights of human suffering which little Mechtild must have encountered every day. And close by, in the vast woods of Prussia, dwelt heathen folk who knew of nothing better than this cruel world. In that very year some of the crusader knights had set out to conquer that pagan kingdom. Thus with on one hand holy Thuringia and with heathen Prussia on the other, with war, famine, and pestilence frequent petitioners at her gates, it is not surprising that the little Mechtild shared the spiritual fervours of her time, and longed to give herself to Heaven.
But she did not, like Gertrude and Mechtild of Hackeborn, enter a convent in her infancy. Most likely she yielded to the entreaties of her family, “of whom she was ever the dearest.” Year after year passed on, and Mechtild still dwelt in her father’s castle. Yet, after that one childish moment of ecstacy, the sweetness and honour of the world were to her as vain and perishable things. And still she was not visited again with trance or vision. She was no dreamer, this eager Mechtild, but a vigorous and healthy girl, in the flower of her beautiful and lusty youth, alert, passionate, with a mind awake to all the questions and interest of the world around her. Such a nature is not by instinct a mystical nature; but the strange contagion of the time had touched her, and worked slowly through her innermost being. Stronger and stronger grew the strenuous unworldly prompting: “without sin, to be disgraced before the world.”
For eleven years the desire waxed and strengthened; for eleven years did Mechtild combat this desire. Daily it grew more impelling, more subduing. At last, in the year 1235, the year of the canonization of Elizabeth, when Mechtild was twenty-three years old, she secretly left her father’s house, and fled to Magdeburg. She left all behind her—brothers and sisters, father and mother, “of whom she was the dearest,” and the courtly honourable life, and the quiet happiness of love and safety. Frau Minne, ihr habt mir benommen weltlich Ehre und allen weltlichen Reichthum! Everything indeed she left, to follow the goading impulse of Sacred Love.
When she reached the strange city, when she had left far behind her the distant home where even now her kinsmen would wonder, and miss her, and make a search, when the night fell on her in Magdeburg, Mechtild desired a shelter. Weary with her flight, she resolved to ask some nunnery to lend her its asylum. Within those holy walls she could more truly yield herself to God.
She knocked at a convent door, and begged for shelter, saying she desired to become a nun. But the quiet sisters distrusted this beautiful, travel-stained young woman of three-and-twenty, without means, or friends, or reference, alone at night in the turbulent city streets—this girl who, by her own confession, had fled her father’s house. Soon those doors were closed against her. There were, however, many convents in a great archiepiscopal city such as Magdeburg. To convent after convent went the despairing girl, finding at each, no doubt, rest for the limbs and food for the body, but in none of all of them a home. For no religious house would admit this unfriended and suspicious creature into its pure community. When the last doors had closed upon her, Mechtild stood in the street, alone in Magdeburg. It must have come upon her then, I think, that at last her great desire was granted—Without sin, she was disgraced before the world.
When Mechtild left her parents’ castle, she had chosen Magdeburg to be her hiding-place, because in that town there lived a friend of her family. She had thought to stay her heart upon the thought of this unvisited friend, who might be her last resource in case of extremity. But now the need was felt, Mechtild did not seek him. He would, she knew, endeavour to persuade her from the path that she had chosen, and Mechtild was in need of all her courage.
So, unfriended, alone, she stood in the streets of Magdeburg. Then she bethought her of another shelter, humble indeed, but safe. And she had left home only to be humbled. What humiliation would there have been in entering, like the dear St. Elizabeth, the holy order of St. Francis? Or what abasement had she, like her brother, embraced the rule of Dominic, “dearest to me,” she avers, “of all the saints”? Here there was no spiritual sacrifice. And what sacrifice of life, of social habit, of esteem could she have made had she entered one of the great Cistercian or Benedictine convents, where the nobles of Saxony and Thuringia were proud to send their daughters? Mechtild was glad that they had rejected her; it seemed to her that at last, pure of pride, free of weak desire, she saw her own will made plain and the directing will of God.
She moved now; she knew what to do and where to go; she was no longer unguided and alone. She went to the beguinage, the home of mendicant widows, the almshouse of the holy poor who gave themselves to God. At that door, which debarred no one from the outer world, Mechtild knocked. A poor woman opened to her, clad in a plain smock and a great mantle covering head and shoulders. Such another gown and cloak was lying by, ready for the welcome Mechtild. She entered the house.
That night Mechtild stood in her little cell. It was much like any convent cell; but it was without a convent’s restrictions or its privileges. Mechtild might quit those walls this year, next year, any year. She might marry and have children. She had, after all, offered up no sacrifice of her own body; she was not dead to the world, but was to live and labour in it more nearly now than in her father’s castle. No great barrier should stand henceforth between her soul and sin. The battle was not over; it was but just begun.
Far easier had been the greater sacrifice, done once and done for ever! Far more peaceful the quiet nunnery, hallowed to rapture and seclusion! Mechtild was now the servant only, and not the bride of Christ. She was a Beguine, not a nun. The accomplished daughter of nobles, she was the companion of the destitute and lowly. It was better thus, better to be lowly and despised, even as Christ was despised. All these thoughts of dismay, rapture, weariness, and exaltation, rushed and clashed through the tired breast of Mechtild. Then, for a second time, the trance crept over her, and she sank unconscious into the ever-present arms of God.