Views it with pity, while dismissing it.
By you to His dominion it was bound,
So firmly, that it since hath had no power
To call on Him but thus: Oh, mighty Lord,
Whate'er thou wilt of me, Thy will is mine.
(Transl. by C. Lyell.)
Lancelot, one of the great mediaeval lovers, possessed a lock of Guinevere's hair, which he prized above all the relics of the saints. When he parted from his mistress (whom he had loved not only spiritually) he fell on his knees before the door of her chamber and prayed as if "he were kneeling before the altar."
Spiritual love was obviously acquiring a religious tinge. The mistress took the place of God; her grace was the source of all joy and consolation; she led the souls of the dying to eternal life. God had yielded His position to her, she had stepped to His side, nay, above Him. With the curse of the Church still clinging to her, she had been remoulded by man's emotion into a perfect, a celestial being. The God of Christianity was in danger—would the new religion of cultured minds, the religion of woman (unwilling to tolerate any other God beside her) replace the religion of the masses? Was a reformation imminent? Would the traditional religion be transformed into metaphysical eroticism, dethroning God, enthroning a goddess? It is impossible to say in what direction the spiritual history of Europe would have developed if Dante had been merely a metaphysical lover, and not also an orthodox theologian; if instead of penetrating to the vision of the divine secret, he had fainted before the face of Beatrice....
The religion of woman and the dominant religion came to terms. This compromise was possible because the Christian pantheon included a female deity who, although she had not hitherto played a prominent part, held an exceptional position: this was Mary, the Mother of the Redeemer. From a.d. 400 to a.d. 1200, her rank had been on a level with the rank of the antique goddesses; now the new emotion enveloped and revivified her. The rigid, soulless image with the golden circle round the head slowly melted into sweet womanhood. In Italy this sentiment inspired wonderful paintings of the Madonna, and was responsible for the development of portraiture in general. The hold of the overwhelming tradition was broken. Rejecting the universal conviction that the historical Mary had resembled the Mary of Byzantine art, the artist, under the dominion of his woman-worship—which surpassed and re-valued all things—drew his inspiration from the fulness of life. I do not agree with Thode that we are indebted to the legend of St. Francis for the modern soulful and highly individualised art. Its source must have been the strongest feeling of the most cultured minds, and that was undoubtedly spiritual love. The Jesuit Beissel wrote with deep regret: "Every master almost formed his own conception of Mary, but in such a way that the hieratic severity of earlier times disappeared but slowly." And he continued: "It is true, the artists' models were the noble ladies of their period; not only on account of their kindly smiling faces, but also on account of the charming coquetry with which their hands drew their cloaks across the bosom." And the art-historian, Male, says: "It is a remarkable fact that in the thirteenth century the legend, or the story, of the Virgin Mary was depicted on the doors of all our (i.e., French) cathedrals."
The difference between the Catholic and the Protestant world-principles is strongly marked in this connection. Catholicism with its striving for absolute uniformity, acknowledging no individual differences, but eager to shape all life and all doctrines in harmony with one definite ideal, very consistently pronounced one single, historical woman to be divine, and made her the object of universal worship. This dogma had to be rigid, immutable, and almost meaningless. Again, the historic and pagan principle of Catholicism was maintained; a unique event in the history of the world was immortalised and systematised and all new religious conceptions were excluded. Catholicism invariably places all really important events in the past, even in a quite definite period of the past, a period unassailable by historical criticism. But with the commencement of individual intellectual life the uniform, ecclesiastical image of the Madonna gradually gained life and individuality. Just as according to Protestant teaching every soul must establish its individual relationship with God (which is subject to change because individuality is not excluded as it is in Catholicism), so the imaginative emotionalist created his own Queen of Heaven. Frequently he was still under the impression—this was especially the case with monks—that he was worshipping the ecclesiastical deity, when he had long been praying to a metaphysical conception of his own. The great Italian art since the fourteenth century, as well as the Neo-Latin and German cults of the Virgin Mary were, though apparently still orthodox, in their innermost essence the outcome of a personal desire for love, and had therefore abandoned the teaching of the Church and become Protestant. The fact that the so-called Protestant Church looked askance at Mary, and that the rather coarse-minded Luther said, in his annoyance: "Popery has made a goddess of Mary, and is therefore guilty of idolatry," does not contradict my statement. The true Queen of Heaven was a conception of the artist and lover, incomprehensible to those who were only thinkers and moralists.