Then, in a vision, Mechtild saw how henceforward her life should be doubly glorious and doubly beset with peril. For she beheld the angel and the devil, who to this moment had been permitted to guide her and assail her, each miraculously changed into twain. Now at her right there stood a cherub, with gifts and holy wisdom on his azure wings, and a seraph bearing her a heart of love. But on the left two devils watched her—two devils who, in all times, have lain in wait for the mystic and the solitary visionary. And the name of the one was Vain-Glory, and that of the other Vain-Desire.
VI.
From the night of that vision begins the career of Mechtild and the history of her visions and her prophecies. At first, indeed, occupied in conquering her strong and lusty youth, the visions of Mechtild of Magdeburg are little different from those of any convent saint. Angels and devils, the beautiful manhood of our Lord, fragments from the Song of Solomon, the rapture of the Spiritual Nuptials—such are the inevitable themes. But this woman, we feel, is no mere Gertrude or Mechtild of Hackeborn. The whole world interests her, and the destinies of the world. In reading the book in which she wrote her visions, the book of the flowing light of Godhead, we soon pass over this initial stage to a second and wider phase.
“Ich habe gesehen ein Stat;
Ihr Name ist die ewige Hass.”
These pregnant words begin Mechtild’s “Vision of Hell.” The plan of this great vision, which beholds, built in succeeding and widening terraces, the habitations of sinners, with fire and darkness, stench and cold, and pain in the bottommost pit, no less than the scheme of the poem, which lashes many a prevalent sin of the Church, both alike recall a far greater poet yet unborn, one who should also explore the depths of hell and the heights of heaven, one who should accept as his guide towards Paradise a certain mysterious Matilda,
“Cantando come donna innamorata,”
in whom the learned Herr Preger has recognized our earnest minstrel of heaven, the loving and singing Mechtild of Magdeburg.
The form of Mechtild’s visions did not make her popular among the churchmen of her city. The people caught up the lilting, dancing measures of her songs. The pious sang her visions. And girls, to whom a nun had ever seemed a cold and sacred being, could understand the happy verses of the fearless love of God, in which Mechtild claims for herself an impulse as natural, as irresistible, as any maiden’s love of her betrothed:—
“Das ist eine kindische Liebe,